Does software design complexity affect maintenance effort?

The design complexity of a software system may be characterized within a refinement level (e.g., data flow among modules), or between refinement levels (e.g., traceability between the specification and the design). We analyzed an existing set of data from NASA's Software Engineering Laboratory to test whether changing software modules with high design complexity requires more personnel effort than changing modules with low design complexity. By analyzing variables singly, we identified strong correlations between software design complexity and change effort for error corrections performed during the maintenance phase. By analyzing variables in combination, we found patterns which identify modules in which error corrections were costly to perform during the acceptance test phase.