Design-level Cohesion Measures: Derivation, Comparison, and Applications

Cohesion was first introduced as a software attribute that could be used to predict properties of implementations that would be created from a given design. Unfortunately, cohesion, as originally defined, could not be objectively assessed, while more recently developed objective cohesion measures depend on code-level information. We show that association-based and slice-based approaches can be used to measure cohesion using only design-level information. Our design-level cohesion measures are formally defined, can be readily implemented, and can support software design, maintenance, and restructuring. Index terms --- cohesion, software measurement and metrics, software design, software maintenance, software restructuring and re-engineering, software visualization, software reuse. 1 Introduction Module cohesion was defined by Yourdan and Constantine as "how tightly bound or related its internal elements are to one another"[10, p. 106]. They describe cohesion as an attribute of design..

Measuring Functional Cohesion

We examine the functional cohesion of procedures using a data slice abstraction. Our analysis identifies the data tokens that lie on more than one slice as the “glue” that binds separate components together. Cohesion is measured in terms of the relative number of glue tokens, tokens that lie on more than one data slice, and super-glue tokens, tokens that lie on all data slices in a procedure, and the adhesiveness of the tokens. The intuition and measurement scale factors are demonstrated through a set of abstract transformations. © 1994, IEEE