Revisiting Class Cohesion: An empirical investigation on several systems

Class cohesion is considered as one of most important object-oriented software attributes. Cohesion refers to the degree of relatedness between members in a class. High cohesion is a desirable property of classes. Several metrics have been proposed in literature in order to measure class cohesion in object-oriented systems. They capture class cohesion in terms of connections between members within a class. Most of these metrics have been experimented and widely discussed. They do not take into account some characteristics of classes as stated in several papers. We present, in this paper, an extention of the cohesion metric we proposed in a previous work. We introduce a new cohesion criterion based on common objects parameters. Our main goal in this work was: (1) to demonstrate, by analyzing many real systems that the introduced criterion is statistically significant and, (2) to validate our approach for class cohesion assessment by exploring empirically the relationship that may exist...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: JOT
• Authors: Linda Badri, Mourad Badri, Alioune Badara Gueye
• Keywords: Class Cohesion, Class Cohesion Assessment, Cohesion Measurement Tool, JOT 2008