Cognitive Complexity Beyond Generalization: A Subjective Rating for the Human Comprehension

Abstract

The cognitive complexity of a software determines the comprehension effort of a particular individual faces when designing, developing and maintaining a software. The comprehension level tends to be varied with each human resulting the cognitive complexity a subjective measurement. Expressing the cognitive complexity as a form of metric quantifies the comprehensibility as a generic value, which does not imply the subjectivity of human factor. This study elaborates the significance of expressing the cognitive complexity as a form of a subjective rating. The cognitive complexity rating has been pioneered with respect to the human and programming dependent factors related to human cognition. The Divisive hierarchical clustering algorithm has been used to train and predict the cognition rating per user. It has been clearly elaborated the subjectivity of the cognitive ratings over the quantitative and static complexity values of current cognitive and software complexity metrics. Thereby, the concept of cognition rates has been proposed as a preliminary step of determining and expressing the cognitive complexity.