Complexity measures the simpleness and understandability of a design. In this

area most of the research on business process metrics has been done (Cardoso

Mendling Neumann & Reijers 2006; Gruhn & Laue 2006 Latva-Koivisto 2001).

For instance both (Gruhn & Laue 2006) and (Cardoso Mendling Neumann & Reijers 2006) consider the adaptation of McCabe's cyclometric number as a complexity metric for business processes. This complexity metric directly measures the number of linearly independent paths through a program’s source code. In practice the industry interpretation of McCabe's cyclomatic complexity thresholds are the following (Frappier Matwin & Mili 1994): from 1 to 10 the program is simple;from 11 to 20 it is slightly complex; from 21 to 50 it is complex; and above 50 it is untestable.

Cyclomatic complexity is software metric that provides a quantitative measure
of the logical complexity of a program. Cyclomatic complexity has a foundation
in graph theory and provides us with extremely useful software metric.
Complexity is computed in one of the three ways:

1. The number of regions of the flow graph corresponds to the Cyclomatic
complexity.

2. Cyclomatic complexity V (G) for a flow graph G is defined as V (G) E-N+2

Where E is the number of flow graph edges N is the number of flow
graph nodes.

3. Cyclomatic complexity V (G) for a flow graph G is also defined as: V (G)
P+1

Where P is the number of predicate nodes contained in the flow
graph G.