An Empirical Investigation of Correlation between Code Complexity and Bugs

There have been many studies conducted on predicting bugs. These studies show that code complexity, such as cyclomatic complexity, correlates with the presence of bugs in code. In this paper, we intend to find the correlation between path complexity and bugs. We found that 1) For simple bugs, there is no strong correlation between the path complexity and the presence of bugs; 2) For complex real-world bugs, though not strong, path complexity has a higher correlation with the presence of bugs than cyclomatic complexity and NPATH complexity. These results are useful for researchers to use the path complexity for building bug prediction models. Moreover, path complexity can be used as a guiding mechanism for test generation.