• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
• /
• v.17 no.6
• /
• pp.153-161
• /
• 2012

In this empirical study at the Web environment based on the frequency distribution of the cyclomatic complexity number of the application, the relevance of the threshold has been analyzed with the next two assumptions. The upper bound established by McCabe in the procedural programming equals 10 and the upper bound established by Lopez in the Java programming equals 5. Which numerical value can be adapted to Web application contexts? In order to answer this 10 web site projects have been collected and a sample of more than 4,000 ASP files has been measured. After analyzing the frequency distribution of the cyclomatic complexity of the Web application, experiment result is that more than 90% of Web application have a complexity less than 50 and also 50 is proposed as threshold of Web application. Web application has the complex architecture with Server, Client and HTML, and the HTML side has the high complexity 35~40. The reason of high complexity is that HTML program is usually made of menu type for home page or site map, and the relevance of that has been explained. In the near future we need to find out if there exist some hidden properties of the Web application architecture related to complexity.