I did my Ph.D. thesis on how network factors can predict and influence user satisfaction in wireless networks. I.e. how “hard” but low-level technical factors have an impact on more abstract entities.
Hegedűs et al does something similar but for source code metrics and their impact on maintainability. It has long been maintained by the software development community that cyclometric complexity and so on will have a high impact on maintainability. Maintainability is important for agile software development!
So do source code metrics predict maintainability? According to the article “A decision tree based classifier achieved a precision of over 76% during the estimation of the Changeability ISO/IEC 9126 attribute.” But how large is the effect?
References
[bibtex file=http://www.citeulike.org/bibtex/user/greger/tag/20120112a?fieldmap=posted-at:posted-date&clean_urls=0]
