ABSTRACT

Software quality depends on several factors such as on time delivery; within budget and fulfilling user's needs. Complexity is one of the most important factors that may affect the quality. Therefore, measuring and controlling the complexity result in improving the quality. So far, most of the researches have tried to identify and measure the complexity in design and code phase. However, when we have the code or design for software, it is too late to control complexity. In this article, with emphasis on Requirement Engineering process, we analyze the causes of software complexity, particularly in the first phase of software development, and propose a requirement based metric. This metric enables a software engineer to measure the complexity before actual design and implementation and choose strategies that are appropriate to the software complexity degree, thus saving on cost and human resource wastage and, more importantly, leading to lower maintenance costs.