MEASUREMENT OF SOFTWARE DESIGN COHESION

摘要

The design of a software architecture is often depicted by graphs that shows elements and their relationships. For example, a structure chart shows calling relationships. Cohesion is an attribute that summarizes the degree of interdependence or connectivity within subsystems. When used in conjunction with measures of other attributes, cohesion can contribute to an assessment of software design quality. Cohesion may also be one of the inputs to a model that predicts faults or some other design quality factor. However, only a few measures of cohesion have been proposed in the literature. This paper proposes an information theory-based measure of cohesion on graphs for application to software design. A graph may be an abstraction of a software system and a subgraph may represent a software module (subsystem).