In Defence of Simplicity
In his essay " A Complexity Measure ", published in December 1976, Thomas J.Mccabe makes the following opening remark: There is a critical question facing software engineering today: how to modularize a software system so the resulting modules are both testable and maintainable? That the issues of testability and maintainability are important is borne out by the fact that we often spend half of the development time in testing and can spend most of our dollars maintaining systems. It amazes me that his remark is still relevant today, almost 50 years after his invention of Cyclomatic Complexity . Writing new code is fun and easy. Making sure you can test it and maintain it for the long run is where things usually start to break. Mccabe's idea was to quantify complexity in a way that will help software developers decide when their software has passed a certain point in complexity, from which it should be modularized. Essentially, you'd start coding while eyeing this com