Utilization of Method Graphs to Measure Cohesion in Object Oriented Software

Utilization of Method Graphs to Measure Cohesion in Object Oriented Software

Abstract

The primarily used technique in measuring cohesion in an object oriented software is analyzing the relations between methods and data members of the software classes. However, extraction of such relations is rather problematic since the usage of data members can vary heavily in program code. Object code analysis is a widely used technique to solve this problem which requires the compilation of the source code. In this paper, we analyze the relations between various method graphs (including call graphs) which can be easily obtained by static source code analysis to obtain software-wide cohesion measures. We perform our analysis to discover the relationship between a widely used cohesion metric, namely LCOM, and the relation among method graphs. This way, we provide cohesion measures that can be extracted rapidly and easily compared to conventional techniques. Proposed measures can be used to obtain information about overall degree of cohesion which in turn can let the designer infer about the quality concerns like modularity and reusability of an object oriented software. Our results show that using different kind of relations in such analysis provides significantly different results in evaluating software-wide average class cohesion. Using graphs involving cooperating methods provide the most correlated results with the LCOM metric.

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Authors
  • Aral, Atakan
  • Ovatman, Tolga
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Shortfacts
Category
Paper in Conference Proceedings or in Workshop Proceedings (Paper)
Event Title
The Seventh IEEE International Workshop on Quality Oriented Reuse of Software
Divisions
Scientific Computing
Subjects
Programmiermethodik
Programmiersprachen
Event Location
Kyoto, Japan
Event Type
Workshop
Event Dates
22-26 Jul 2013
Series Name
COMPSAC 2013: The IEEE Signature Conference on Computers, So!ware & Applications
ISSN/ISBN
978-1-4799-2159-
Page Range
pp. 505-510
Date
July 2013
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