USING DISTANCE MEASUREMENT FOR SOFTWARE FUNCTIONAL COHESION

摘要

The cohesion is a major attribute for software modules and it is used in software engineering as an important software quality factor. Module cohesion indicates how much the components of a module are related. In software engineering, highly cohesive modules are more desirable due to their reusability and maintainability. Cohesion is classified into levels. Functional cohesion is the strongest cohesion level and it refers to how much the module parts that contribute to different outputs are related. Data slicing has been successfully used in measuring functional cohesion. In this paper, a novel technique is introduced to measure the functional cohesion of a module. The technique uses the distance between module data slices as a basis to measure the functional cohesion. The technique is evaluated by showing that the intuition is consistent with the measurement values.