Understanding code complexity

[Intaris]

I recently refactored a legacy VI which was programmed in 7.1 days.  It involved the usage of about 20 occurrences to trigger many parallel loops, each of which contained a simple operation.

The code had a complexity of 7.3 (2012 property).

I refactored the code to include a nice producer consumer architecture, got rid of FP elements for temporary data storage, introduced a state machine for handling UI updates and generally optimised what I could according to my understanding of good coding.

After all that I have a code complexity of 6.8.  I was expecting a MUCH larger drop than that.

What exactly determines code complexity?  What has a large impact, what has a small impact?  If I compare the VI I modified with a version of the OLD VI which a colleague changed (a lot lot less than I changed) his version gives a code complexity of 4.3 (with 20 parallel loops coordinated with occurrences, each with their FP component and using Locals everywhere).

Both the memory footprint of my version is about 50% higher than before and the code size is double that from before.  How can this be?

The one major change I made was using user events to communicate between my consumer and producer.  My API has a total of 40 user events, not exactly a lot really.

[Yamaeda]

Could it be attributed to the notion of "How hard is this for another to understand"?

If so, events are harder to understand than loops and local variables.

I remade a testprogram due to too big version difference, and went from 200ish vi's and 5Mb code to 40-50 and 1,5Mb code. 🙂

/Y

[billko]

I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for?  Analyzing Code Complexity with VI Analyzer Toolkit?

[Intaris]

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@billko wrote:

I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for?  Analyzing Code Complexity with VI Analyzer Toolkit?

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No that's not what I'm looking for.

For me the program as it is now is FAR more readable and understandeable for a human, but for a computer?  I dunno.

I tried blanking out parts of the code and apparently my event structure (operating purely on user events) which basically simply receives data per user events and places them in a cluster is the offender.  UI operations are performed AFTER this event structure _(a loop which doesn't add significantly to the complexity).

Why on earth does an Event loop with a lot of "Insert this data into a cluster" give sich high complexity?

[nathand]

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Intaris wrote:

Both the memory footprint of my version is about 50% higher than before and the code size is double that from before.  How can this be?

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It's been a while, but I think I've seen (and seen reports of) cases where updating a VI from an old version caused a large increase in the VI file size. Copying the contents of the VI to a new, blank block diagram and saving that resulted in a much smaller file.

[GregFreeman]

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@Intaris wrote:

I recently refactored a legacy VI which was programmed in 7.1 days.

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That's a very exact measurement of the time it took. 

[Intaris]

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@for(imstuck) wrote:

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@Intaris wrote:

I recently refactored a legacy VI which was programmed in 7.1 days.

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That's a very exact measurement of the time it took. 

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Yeah, my boss keeps moaning about our lack of productivity nowadays.

My new VI was programmed in 2012 days........

[GregFreeman]

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@Intaris wrote:

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@for(imstuck) wrote:

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@Intaris wrote:

I recently refactored a legacy VI which was programmed in 7.1 days.

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That's a very exact measurement of the time it took. 

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Yeah, my boss keeps moaning about our lack of productivity nowadays.

My new VI was programmed in 2012 days........

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Things became very inefficient between 8.6 and 2009.

[Yamaeda]

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Things became very inefficient between 8.6 and 2009.

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It's been missed in the patch notes, but they've changed the base unit to minutes for a better resolution. Now stuff is done i 2012 mins, or ~4.2 days. 🙂

[Intaris]

But on a more serious note.

Spoiler

C#

Spoiler

No, seriously serious,  I'll try copying everything into an empty VI to see if things improve.  I'm skeptical to be honest, but we'll see.