A cohesion measure for object-oriented classes

Abstract

In object-oriented systems, cohesion refers to the degree of the relatedness of the members in a class and strong cohesion has been recognized as a highly desirable property of classes. We note that the existing cohesion measures do not take into account some characteristics of classes, and thus often fail to properly reflect the cohesiveness of classes. To cope with such a problem, we propose a new cohesion measure where the characteristics of classes are incorporated. Our cohesion measure takes into account the members that actually have impact on the cohesiveness of a class, and is defined in terms of the degree of the connectivity among those members. We develop a cohesion measurement tool for C++ programs, and perform a case study on a well-known class library in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our new measure. By performing principal component analysis, we also demonstrate that our measure captures a new aspect of class properties which is not captured by the existing cohesion measures. Copyright (C) 2000 John Whey & Sons, Ltd.