An Investigation into Coupling Measures for C++
by
L. Briand, P. Devanbu, and
W. L. Melo
Proc. of the 19th Int'l Conf. on Software
Engineering, Boston, MA, May 1997. IEEE Press.
Abstract:
This paper proposes a comprehensive suite of measures to quantify the
level of class coupling during the design of object-oriented
systems. This suite takes into account the different OO design
mechanisms provided by the C++ language (e.g., friendship between
classes, specialization, and aggregation) but it can be tailored to
other OO languages. The different measures in our suite thus reflect
different hypotheses about the different mechanisms of coupling in OO
systems. Based on actual project defect data, the hypotheses
underlying our coupling measures are empirically validated by
analyzing their relationship with the probability of fault detection
across classes. The results demonstrate that some of these coupling
measures may be useful early quality indicators of the design of OO
systems. These measures are conceptually different from the OO design
measures defined by Chidamber and Kemerer; in addition, our data
suggests that they are complementary quality indicators.
Key-words
Coupling on Object-Oriented Design; C++ programming language; prediction model of fault-prone components.
Copyright 1997 IEEE. Published in the Proceedings of
the 19th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-19),
May1997, Boston, MA. Personal use of this material is
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Last updated on March 30, 1999 by
Walcélio Melo