An investigation into coupling measures for C++

Abstract

This paper proposes a comprehensive suite of measures to quantify the level of class coupling during the design of object-oriented systems. This suite takes into account the different OO design mechanisms provided by the C++ language (e.g., friendship between classes, specialization, and aggregation) but it can be tailored to other OO languages. The different measures in our suite thus reflect different hypotheses about the different mechanisms of coupling in OO systems. Based on actual project defect data, the hypotheses underlying our coupling measures are empirically validated by analyzing their relationship with the probability of fault detection across classes. The results demonstrate that some of these coupling measures may be useful early quality indicators of the design of OO systems. These measures are conceptually different from the OO design measures defined by Chidamber and Kemerer; in addition, our data suggests that they are complementary quality indicators.

Untitled

“…Of the coupling measures, the following measures fulfill all coupling properties: MPC, the ICP measures, and the measures of the suite by Briand et al [5]. Of the remaining measures, some measures do not have a null value (the RFC measures, DAC and DAC'), some are not additive when two unconnected classes are merged (CBO, CBO', the RFC measures, DAC').…”

“…The measures affected by this simplification are MPC, the ICP measures, the method-method interaction measures by Briand et al [5], and ICH. 1 The values for each of the design measures were collected for each of the 83 LALO classes that were developed from scratch.…”

“…A large number of object-oriented (OO) measures have been proposed in the literature ( [5], [11], [13], [14], [18], [21], [23], [24], [25], [26]). A particular emphasis has been given to the measurement of design artifacts, in order to help assess quality early on during the development process.…”

“…But how do we know what measures actually capture important quality aspects? Many of the measures proposed and their relationships to external quality attributes of OO designs, have been the focus of little empirical investigation ( [1], [5], [6], [15], [16], [23]). It is therefore difficult to assess whether these measures capture complementary dimensions or are indicators of any relevant external quality attributes such as reliability or maintainability.…”

A Survey of Dynamic Software Metrics

“…Other major metrics suites proposed for object-oriented systems are MOOD metrics [5] , Lorenz and Kidd metrics [6] , Briand et al metrics [7] , Harrison et al metrics [8] and Bansiya et al metrics [9] . Static metrics focus on static properties of the software and a number of static metrics have been proposed in literature for the measurement of coupling [4,7,[10][11][12][13][14][15][16] , cohesion [4,[11][12][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] and other attributes of object-oriented software using design or source code of the software, which are static in nature. The static metrics are able to quantify various aspects of the complexity of design or source code of a software system, but their ability to accurately predict the dynamic behaviour of an application is as yet unproven.…”