Static analysis of object oriented systems using extended control flow graph

The basic features of object oriented software makes it difficult to apply traditional testing methods like McCabe's Cyclomatic complexity in object oriented systems. The control flow graph used in procedural systems has been extended to be applicable for object oriented systems as ECFG. ECFG is a layered CFG where nodes refer to methods rather than statements. Our work is based on analyzing static characteristics of a system using ECFG. Extended cyclornatic complexity (E-CC) refers to the number of independent execution paths within the software. In this paper we have described different ways in which CFGs of individual methods are connected in an ECFG and E-CC for these different cases are given along with small code examples for substantiating our findings. Finally we have taken an ECFG of a fairly large system and applied these cases to arrive at the E-CC of the system considered as our example.