A novel approach about cohesion measurement for classes

Cohesion refers to the degree of the relationships among the members in a class. A class is cohesive when its members are highly correlated. Several metrics have been proposed in the literature in order to capture class cohesion in terms of connections among members. They generally count the number of attributes used by methods or the number of methods pairs that share attributes. They constitute a restrictive way for capturing the cohesion. Because they do not consider some characteristics of classes like that special methods, disjoint interaction patterns and connectivity among class members. In this study, a new criterion, which focuses on interactions and groups between class members with considering density of connections among members and incorporates the special methods to cohesion capturing process, is presented, and a new notion about determination of class cohesion is proposed.