An Approach to Evaluate the Complexity of Block-Based Software Product

Abstract

Computer programming skills have been growing as a professional competence also to unqualified end-users who need to develop software in their professional practice. Quality evaluation models of end-user-developed products are still scarce. In this paper, we propose a metric that leverages “When”, a condition typically found in block-based software development frameworks. We evaluated 80 Scratch projects collecting a metric related to the presence of the When condition and investigated common traits and differentiation with other metrics already proposed in the literature. We found that, in an evaluation with respect to the conditionals found in Scratch projects, When delivers a distinct and complementary approach to software complexity in products developed using block-oriented software development tools.

Keywords

• software metrics
• block-based programming language
• scratch
• complexity
• when
• end-user software engineering
• euse
• software quality