A Proposal of a New Class Cohesion Criterion: An Empirical Study

Linda Badri and Mourad Badri, Department of Mathematics and Computer ScienceUniversity of Quebec at Trois-Rivières, Canada

TOOLS USA 2003
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Abstract

Class cohesion refers to the degree of the relatedness of the members in a class. It is considered as one of most important object-oriented software attributes. Several metrics have been proposed in the literature in order to measure class cohesion in object-oriented systems. They capture class cohesion in terms of connections among members within a class. The major existing class cohesion metrics are essentially based on instance variables usage criteria. It is only a special and a restricted way of capturing class cohesion. We believe, as stated in many papers, that class cohesion should not exclusively be based on common instance variables usage criteria. We introduce, in this paper, a new criterion, which focuses on interactions between class methods. We developed a cohesion measurement tool for Java programs and performed a case study on several systems. The obtained results demonstrate that our new class cohesion metric, based on the proposed cohesion criteria, captures several pairs of related methods, which are not captured by the existing cohesion metrics.

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About the authors

		Linda Badri (Linda_Badri@uqtr.ca) is professor of computer science at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières. She holds a PhD in computer science (software engineering) from the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Lyon, France. Her main areas of interest include object-oriented software engineering and Web engineering.
		Mourad Badri (Mourad_Badri@uqtr.ca) is professor of computer science at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières. He holds a PhD in computer science (software engineering) from the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Lyon, France. His main areas of interest include object-oriented software engineering, aspect orientation and formal methods.

Cite this article as follows: Londa Badri and Mourad Badri: “A Proposal of a New Class Cohesion Criterion: An Empirical Study”, in Journal of Object Technology, vol. 3, no. 4, April 2004, Special issue: TOOLS USA 2003, pp. 145-159. http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2004_04/article8