Editing Cyclomatic complexity (section)

===Limiting complexity during development===
One of McCabe's original applications was to limit the complexity of routines during program development. He recommended that programmers should count the complexity of the modules they are developing, and split them into smaller modules whenever the cyclomatic complexity of the module exceeded 10.<ref name="mccabe76" /> This practice was adopted by the [[NIST]] Structured Testing methodology, which observed that since McCabe's original publication, the figure of 10 had received substantial corroborating evidence. However, it also noted that in some circumstances it may be appropriate to relax the restriction and permit modules with a complexity as high as 15. As the methodology acknowledged that there were occasional reasons for going beyond the agreed-upon limit, it phrased its recommendation as "For each module, either limit cyclomatic complexity to [the agreed-upon limit] or provide a written explanation of why the limit was exceeded."<ref name="nist">{{cite web|
url=http://www.mccabe.com/pdf/mccabe-nist235r.pdf| title=Structured Testing: A Testing Methodology Using the Cyclomatic Complexity Metric|author1=Arthur H. Watson |author2=Thomas J. McCabe | year=1996|publisher=NIST Special Publication 500-235}}</ref>