A survey on software coupling relations and tools

Context Coupling relations reflect the dependencies between software entities and can be used to assess the quality of a program. For this reason, a vast amount of them has been developed, together with tools to compute their related metrics. However, this makes the coupling measures suitable for a given application challenging to find. Goals The first objective of this work is to provide a classification of the different kinds of coupling relations, together with the metrics to measure them. The second consists in presenting an overview of the tools proposed until now by the software engineering academic community to extract these metrics. Method This work constitutes a systematic literature review in software engineering. To retrieve the referenced publications, publicly available scientific research databases were used. These sources were queried using keywords inherent to software coupling. We included publications from the period 2002 to 2017 and highly cited earlier publications. A snowballing technique was used to retrieve further related material. Results Four groups of coupling relations were found: structural, dynamic, semantic and logical. A fifth set of coupling relations includes approaches too recent to be considered an independent group and measures developed for specific environments. The investigation also retrieved tools that extract the metrics belonging to each coupling group. Conclusion This study shows the directions followed by the research on software coupling: e.g., developing metrics for specific environments. Concerning the metric tools, three trends have emerged in recent years: use of visualization techniques, extensibility and scalability. Finally, some coupling metrics applications were presented (e.g., code smell detection), indicating possible future research directions. Public preprint [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2002001]

Analysing the Contribution of Coupling Metrics for the Development and Management of Process Architectures

Currently, the development and modeling of enterprise architectures is an intensively discussed topic in both science and practice. Process architectures represent a core element in recent enterprise architecture frameworks. With process models being a central means for communicating and documenting the process architectures, both their quality and understandability are decisive. However, the concept of process model quality is still not fully understood. The recent development has highlighted the role of coupling in models. Coupling is expected to represent an important dimension of quality for conceptual models. Still, this perspective is hardly understood and its definition vague. Therefore, this work collects diverse coupling interpretations in the field of process modelling and integrates them to a common and precise definition. Once introduced and formally specified, the metrics serve as a basis for a discussion on coupling and on how the future development in respect to coupling could look like. The main findings are that currently metrics evaluate either the documentation of the process architecture regarding its understandability or they contribute to the individual applications of process architectures. These findings support practitioners selecting metrics for a particular task and scientists to identify research gaps for further development

Developing Secure Systems: A Comparative Study of Existing Methodologies

With the increasing demand for developing high-quality and more reliable systems, the process of developing trustworthy computer software is a challenging one. In this paper, we review various approaches to producing more secure systems. This includes established general principles for designing secure systems. It also provides an introduction to general software quality measurements including existing software security metrics. This paper also includes a comparison of the various security metrics for developing secure systems (i.e., architectural, design, and code-level metrics). Lastly, the paper examines the approach of refactoring, illustrates its objectives, and shows how refactoring is generally used for enhancing the quality of existing programs from the perspective of information security. At the end of this paper, we provide a discussion of these three approaches and how they can be used to provide guidance for future secure software development processes

Cohesion Metrics for Improving Software Quality

Abstract Software product metrics aim at measuring the quality of software. Modu- larity is an essential factor in software quality. In this work, metrics related to modularity and especially cohesion of the modules, are considered. The existing metrics are evaluated, and several new alternatives are proposed. The idea of cohesion of modules is that a module or a class should consist of related parts. The closely related principle of coupling says that the relationships between modules should be minimized. First, internal cohesion metrics are considered. The relations that are internal to classes are shown to be useless for quality measurement. Second, we consider external relationships for cohesion. A detailed analysis using design patterns and refactorings confirms that external cohesion is a better quality indicator than internal. Third, motivated by the successes (and problems) of external cohesion metrics, another kind of metric is proposed that represents the quality of modularity of software. This metric can be applied to refactorings related to classes, resulting in a refactoring suggestion system. To describe the metrics formally, a notation for programs is developed. Because of the recursive nature of programming languages, the properties of programs are most compactly represented using grammars and formal lan- guages. Also the tools that were used for metrics calculation are described.Siirretty Doriast

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Siirretty Doriast

Metriken zur Bewertung und Verbesserung von Prozessmodellen

Die Zielsetzung dieser Arbeit ist die Entwicklung von Artefakten zur Messung der Prozessmodellverständlichkeit. Im Schwerpunkt „Good Decomposition“ wurden hierfür fünf Conditions evaluiert und zwölf Metriken entwickelt. Im Bereich „Coupling“ wurden hierfür neun Metriken entwickelt und jene drei der Kontrollflusskomplexität evaluiert. Insbesondere aber wurden für jeden Schritt des Entwicklungszyklusses von den verschiedenen Theorien bis zu den fertigen Metriken Methoden aufgezeigt und exemplarisch angewendet. Diese Methoden können herangezogen werden, um die Entwicklung weiterer Metriken zu erleichtern

Microscopic coupling metrics for refactoring

It is observed that most object oriented coupling metrics are macroscopic, which makes them unsuitable for making finer refactoring decisions. The notions of microscopic viewpoints and coupling projections are introduced. Existing metrics are classified in terms of viewpoints and projections. Two microscopic metrics called Relative Method Coupling (RMC) and Relative Inward Coupling (RIC) are introduced, and a method of applying them to refactoring is discussed. A case study is also included