A Research Design and Experiment for Validating the ∝ Metric

The ∝ metric takes an entirely new approach to measurement based on chaos theory, and has been proposed as a measure of amongst other things software complexity. The ProComplex tool has been developed to measure the ∝ metric for documents containing text. All software measures require extensive validation before they can be put forward as being of practical use. In this paper a research design for validating the ∝ metric and a simple experiment performed as part of that design are described. The six part research design enables the investigation of the ∝ metric and ProComplex tool to retain the holistic and meaningful characteristics of a real-world situation. The results presented show that, as expected, further experimental results are necessary before any firm conclusions can be drawn.