If you are responsible for reviewing, maintaining, or testing pascal based source code the application of cyclomatic complexity can be used to assist you in determining areas of your source code that require the most attention. It provides you with a highly systematic and standardized measurement that can quickly focus you on the areas of your source code that can benefit from increased effort in refactoring and unit testing. This is provided with bias on source formatting preferences or other readability factors that can often tend towards personal preferences amongst individual developers.

I am sure we have all looked at a routine, a module, or a class and had to read through it more than twice to get some idea of what was going on. When this happens you immediately become more tentative about applying changes to that particular bit of code. In practice, this is often an indicator that the code should actually be modified to enhance your ability to maintain that segment of code. If you don't have any unit test cases you are much more likely to leave it along or worse yet, dive right in. By measuring the cyclomatic complexity of the routine before you start it will quickly give you an idea of the number of test cases that should exist to exercise the routine and whether the routine has reach a level of complexity that it should be seriously examined for reconstructive surgery (ala rewrite).

I spend more time reviewing and/or editing code that is not my own; and over time have been able to develop a decent sense of how complex a module is after a visual scan or two. The only problem with this is that no matter how hard you try you end up applying your personal formatting preferences as a penalty to the underlying code. This isn't fair and it certainly isn't following a great process. Using cyclomatic complexity has helped me be much more fair and better focus review efforts.

The other significant benefit of applying cyclomatic complexity measurements to your source code is that it provides a clear and statistical message that you can take to your management responsible for resourcing. With this information in hand you will have a much stronger case for allocation of resources to make internal software changes that cannot be directly related to software features or client requested change requests. Using these figures together with your developer's maintenance investment hours can be a geat way to focus your group on code improvements that pay in the long run.

The RTS Cyclomatic Complexity calculator is provided both in binary and source forms. If you are comfortable with compiling and installing source packages I recommend you start with the source package (besides, then you can tweak it). If you want to get started quickly and easily than just download the package that matches the version of Delphi you have, install it, and you are off to the races.

You can provide feedback, bugs, and suggestions by sending an e-mail to ryan @ run-time-systems.com. Please be sure to include CCP as part of the subject line otherwise it may not get noticed or claimed as spam.

Portions of the source code are covered by the MPL license as indicated in the references section of this page. Use of those source code modules must comply with said license.

Source code modules supplied as part of this distribution that are the sole ownership and copyright of Run-Time Systems may be used in whatever manner you would like provided you accept that neither myself nor Run-Time Systems will accept any accountability or liability for such usage.