Complexity is in the Brain of the Beholder: A Psychological Perspective on Software Engineering's Ultimate Challenge

摘要

Complexity of software has been largely studied as a property of the code. We argue instead that complexity is a psychological phenomenon and should be studied from this perspective. The psychological literature however is structured in a way making of little practical usefulness. We propose a model based on isolated psychological facts connected by intuitive reasoning to fight complexity in a practical way. In this model, complexity corresponds to occurrences of cognitive overload in the working memory (WM), the bottleneck of cognition. Reducing complexity can be achieved by relieving the WM of some load by explicitly representing the internal mental constructs using external media such as software tools. We present a case study in which we used this model to produce a tool to reduce the complexity in program comprehension for large software systems. The tool was used in an industrial setting. We present here the mental constructs targeted and the details of the tool.