A Coupling and Cohesion Metrics Suite for Object-Oriented Software

The increasing need for software quality measurements has led to extensive research into software metrics and the development of software metric tools. To maintain high quality software, developers need to strive for a low-coupled and highly cohesive design. However, as mentioned by many researchers, coupling and cohesion metrics lack formal and standardized definitions and thus for each metric there is more than one interpretation. This paper introduces our view of coupling and cohesion metrics and our implementation approach. Coupling and cohesion metrics are calculated by considering a number of relationships, which were introduced by several researchers. Based on the relationships, some sets of metrics were chosen. The selected metrics are then formalized to aid the implementation of the metrics to actual software codes. The formalized metrics have been implemented in CCMETRICS, a tool for calculating the coupling and cohesion metrics of object-oriented software.