Static Members and Cycles in Java Software

The static modifier is a convenient way to make class members "global" in object-oriented software systems. Given this, we wondered if static members significantly contribute to the long dependency cycles among the classes that we observed in a previous empirical study of Java software. In this paper, we examine 81 open source Java applications. We find empirical evidence that classes that declare a non-private static field or method that is accessed from within another class are likely to be involved in dependency cycles.