Designlevel Cohesion Measures Derivation, Comparison, and Applications.pdfVIP

Design-level Cohesion Measures: Derivation, Comparison, and Applications Byung-Kyo o Kang James M. Bieman Department of Computer Science Colorado State University Fort Collins, Colorado 80523 USA kang@cs.colostate.edu, bieman@cs.colostate.edu Abstract the asso ciations b etween pro cessing elements as a set Cohesion was rst developed to pr edict pr operties of rules concerning data dep endencies in mo dule co de. of implementations created fr om a given design. Un- Bieman and Ott [2] use a slice-based approach to mea- fortunately, cohesion, as original ly dened, could not sure functional cohesion in terms of the connections be objectively assessed, while more recently developed b etween mo dule output slices. Class cohesion mea- objective cohesion measures depend on code-level in- sures for ob ject-oriented software have also b een de- formation. We show that association-based and slice- ned using a slice-based approach, and by analyzing based approaches can be used to measure cohesion us- the connectivity b etween metho ds through common ing only design-level information. Our design-level co- references to instance variables [1, 5]. hesion measures are formal ly dened, can be readily We use b oth the asso ciation-based and slice-based implemented, and can support software design, main- approaches to develop design-level cohesion measures. tenance, and restructuring. 2 Asso ciation-based Cohesi