Measuring coupling and cohesion of software modules: an information-theory approach

Allen, Edward B.; Khoshgoftaar, Taghi M.; Chen, Y.

doi:10.1109/metric.2001.915521

Cited by 51 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…There has been few notable efforts to measure quality aspects of package organization in the past [10], [11], but, there are still research opportunities to explore others dimensions of packages for characterizing the object oriented systems on distinct criteria [12]. There exists a lot of work in the literature proposing metrics for OO software.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the Bug-Prediction with Re-Usability Based Package Organization for Object Oriented Software Systems

Shaikh

Lee

2017

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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SUMMARYPackages are re-usable components for faster and effective software maintenance. To promote the re-use in object-oriented systems and maintenance tasks easier, packages should be organized to depict compact design. Therefore, understanding and assessing package organization is primordial for maintenance tasks like Re-usability and Changeability. We believe that additional investigations of prevalent basic design principles such as defined by R.C. Martin are required to explore different aspects of package organization. In this study, we propose package-organization framework based on reachable components that measures re-usability index. Package re-usability index measures common effect of change taking place over dependent elements of a package in an object-oriented design paradigm. A detailed quality assessment on different versions of open source software systems is presented which evaluates capability of the proposed package re-usability index and other traditional package-level metrics to predict fault-proneness in software. The experimental study shows that proposed index captures different aspects of package-design which can be practically integrated with best practices of software development. Furthermore, the results provide insights on organization of feasible software design to counter potential faults appearing due to complex package dependencies. key words: package reuse, software quality, fault-proneness prediction

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the Bug-Prediction with Re-Usability Based Package Organization for Object Oriented Software Systems

Shaikh

Lee

2017

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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“…Another set of metrics has come out of informationtheoretic approaches to software clustering [30], [31]. Here, the goal is to characterize modules on the basis of the predictive power (as measured by, say, mutual information in the information-theoretic sense) of the software artifacts vis-a-vis the modules in which the artifacts reside.…”

Section: Previous Work On Software Metrics Relevant To Our Contributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

API-Based and Information-Theoretic Metrics for Measuring the Quality of Software Modularization

Sarkar

RAMA

Kak

2007

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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Abstract-We present in this paper a new set of metrics that measure the quality of modularization of a non-object-oriented software system. We have proposed a set of design principles to capture the notion of modularity and defined metrics centered around these principles. These metrics characterize the software from a variety of perspectives: structural, architectural, and notions such as the similarity of purpose and commonality of goals. (By structural, we are referring to intermodule coupling-based notions, and by architectural, we mean the horizontal layering of modules in large software systems.) We employ the notion of API (Application Programming Interface) as the basis for our structural metrics. The rest of the metrics we present are in support of those that are based on API. Some of the important support metrics include those that characterize each module on the basis of the similarity of purpose of the services offered by the module. These metrics are based on information-theoretic principles. We tested our metrics on some popular open-source systems and some large legacy-code business applications. To validate the metrics, we compared the results obtained on human-modularized versions of the software (as created by the developers of the software) with those obtained on randomized versions of the code. For randomized versions, the assignment of the individual functions to modules was randomized.

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“…Metrics such as LCOM [5] have been heavily criticized and as such have little value. It is our goal to evaluate whether some cohesion metrics e.g., LCOM* [16] or other cohesion and coupling metrics [1,23] can support our visual characterization.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…• BASE VISUALWORKS is a large portion of the Cincom VisualWorks Smalltalk environment 1 . It is an industrial system, developed over the last 15 years.…”

Section: Approach Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hautus introduced Pasta, a tool to analyze the structure of Java programs and a metric to determine the quality of the package architecture [15]. Allen et al defined information theory-based -as opposed to counting -coupling and cohesion metrics for modules [1] that are represented as graphs. They define module and intramodule in terms of the subgraph's information and cohesion in terms of intramodule coupling.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Butterflies: A Visual Approach to Characterize Packages

Ducasse

Lanza

Ponisio

11th IEEE International Software Metrics Symposium (METRICS'05)

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Understanding sets of classes, or packages, is an important activity in the development and reengineering of large object-oriented systems. Packages represent the coarsegrained structure of an application. They are artefacts to deploy and structure software, and therefore more than a simple generalization of classes. The relationships between packages and their contained classes are key in the decomposition of an application and its (re)-modularisation. However, it is difficult to quickly grasp the structure of a package and to understand how a package interacts with the rest of the system. We tackle this problem using butterfly visualizations, i.e., dedicated radar charts built from simple package metrics based on a language-independent meta-model. We illustrate our approach on two applications and show how we can retrieve the relevant characteristics of packages.

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Measuring coupling and cohesion of software modules: an information-theory approach

Cited by 51 publications

References 30 publications

Assessing the Bug-Prediction with Re-Usability Based Package Organization for Object Oriented Software Systems

Assessing the Bug-Prediction with Re-Usability Based Package Organization for Object Oriented Software Systems

API-Based and Information-Theoretic Metrics for Measuring the Quality of Software Modularization

Butterflies: A Visual Approach to Characterize Packages

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