While every item, at every compositional level (method, class, package and high-level package), is measured for excess complexity, it is clear that a highly tangled breakout in a high-level package is going to be more disruptive to development processes than a single excessively complex method, and our measurement framework needs to reflect this to be truly useful.

This is achieved by relating the normalized degree of excess complexity to the size of the measured item. For example, if a package has excess complexity of 50% and a size of 1,000 lines of code (LOC), then we say that the item has an "XS" of 500. Nominally relating excess complexity to LOC lets us compare the excessive complexity of items at different levels in the code-base, and helps to prioritize complexity-related problems.

The final piece of the XS framework is to summarize the XS contained by every level of composition. This will enable the comparison of the amount of XS in projects, components, packages, etc.