An Empirical Analysis of the Relationship between Cohesion and Testing Effort

Abstract

Predicting software testability can reduce costs and efforts. Cohesion, as one of software quality metrics, found to be good indicator for software testability. Although there is a good interest in software testability on the class level in the literature, software testability on the package level has not received the same interest. The paper investigates the relationship between a newly proposed package cohesion metric and software testing effort. The empirical analysis used data collected from five Java open source software systems for which JUnit test classes are available. The results show that as good the package cohesion is, as the less testing effort is needed. The stability of the correlations allows us to draw optimistic conclusions about its use as an indicator.

Predicting Costly Maintenance Packages Using Package Cohesion

“…In this section, we present another empirical study we performed that has been motivated by our previous works in investigating how package cohesion is related to package maintainability [13] and package testability [14]. Using logistic regression analysis, the study investigates the relationship between package cohesion and maintainability in terms of maintenance effort.…”

“…In previous work [12], [13], the cohesion metric (CH) was found to be a significant early predictor for software maintenance efforts; which encouraged us to conduct further investigation of software maintainability using the CH metric. The stability of the impact of CH across different statistic analyses performed either with relation to software maintainability [13] or software testability [14] allows us to draw optimistic conclusions about its use as an indicator. Furthermore, based on the obtained results, we can believe that following the package cohesion principles by Martin [6], which the (CH) cohesion metric was developed based on, can improve the software maintainability.…”

“…According to design principles [6], package design should maximize its cohesion and minimize its coupling with other packages in the software system. Our cohesion metric considers the factors that can affect software maintainability, and it has shown some encouraging results about the correlation between cohesion on one side and maintainability [13] and testability [14 ] on the other side. The current work is an extension to these previous studies in investigating the ability of our package cohesion metric along with a package size metric in predicting the maintenance of costly software packages.…”

“…Our previous work [11], [12] presented the new package cohesion metric that has been created based on Martin's package cohesion principles. This new metric has also been empirically validated [13], [14]. Package cohesion is meant to be the coherence of a package among its classes that should be closely related.…”

Demand Based Test Case Generation for Object Oriented System

“…25, 50, 75 and 100% of time needed to execute all test cases. Albattah and Melton [40] analysed relation between cohesion and testing effort.…”