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The cyclomatic complexity (CC) metric measures the number of linearly independent paths through a piece of code. Although Thomas McCabe developed CC for procedural languages, its popularity has endured throughout the object-oriented era. That said, CC is one of the most controversial metrics, shunned for the most part by academia for certain theoretical weaknesses and the belief that it's no more useful than a simple “lines of code” metric. However, most metrics collection tools support its collection, and, paradoxically, industry uses it extensively. So, why is this the case? This question also leads to fundamental perennial questions about industry's exposure to academic opinion and whether academic research fails to take account of software development's daily practicalities. Maybe industry is simply looking for straightforward, widely understood metrics?
Ebert et al. (Fri,) studied this question.