A Pilot Study of Module Interconnectedness

Complexity plays an important role in understanding and working with a program, and has been measured in many different ways for software applications. The use of statistical analysis is one of the ways to predict the pattern of complexity among the modules present in a software application. A random sample of twelve software applications was selected for this study to examine complexity. A single pair of complexity measures was evaluated. This pair of complexity measures was the indegrees and out-degrees for each module of an application. The next step was to try to fit suitable statistical distributions to the in-degrees and to the out-degrees. By using various statistical distributions such as the normal, log-normal, exponential, geometric, uniform, poisson and the chi-square, we try to determine the type of distribution for the in-degrees and the type of distribution for out-degrees of the modules present in the software applications so that the pattern of complexity can be derived. The chi-square goodness of fit test was used to test various null hypotheses about the distributions for the in-degrees and for the out-degrees. Results showed that the pattern of in-degrees and the pattern of out-degrees both followed chi-square distributions