Run-Time Cohesion Metrics: An Empirical Investigation

摘要

Cohesion is one of the fundamental measures of the 'goodness' of a software design. The most accepted and widely studied object-oriented cohesion metric is Chi-damber and Kemerer's Lack of Cohesion in Methods measure. However due to the nature of object-oriented programs, static design metrics fail to quantify all the underlying dimensions of cohesion, as program behaviour is a function of it operational environment as well as the complexity of the source code. For these, reasons two run-time object-oriented cohesion metrics are described in this paper, and applied to Java programs from the SPECjvm98 benchmark suite. A statistical analysis is conducted to assess the fundamental properties of the measures and investigate whether they are redundant with respect to the static cohesion metric. Results to date indicate that run-time cohesion metrics can provide an interesting and informative qualitative analysis of a program and complement existing static cohesion metrics.