Refactoring Effect on Cohesion Metrics

Developers and designers always strive for quality software. Quality software tends to be robust, reliable and easy to maintain, and thus reduces the cost of software development and maintenance. Class cohesion is an important internal quality attribute. Several methods have been applied to improve software quality; refactoring is one of those methods. The goal of this paper is to investigate whether refactoring improves software quality, by improving class cohesion. This is done by examining different cohesion metrics values after refactoring is applied. We found that in general refactoring indeed improves class cohesion values.