Novel sensitive object-oriented cohesion metric

Abstract

The production of well-developed software reduces the cost of the software maintainability. Therefore, many software metrics have been developed to measure the quality of the software design. Measuring class cohesion is considered as one of the most important software quality measurements. Unfortunately, most of approaches that have been proposed on cohesion metrics do not consider the different intersections between class elements in measuring class cohesion. This paper proposes a novel class cohesion metric that considers the different cohesion intersections. Experiments are carried out on more than 35K classes from more than 16 open-source projects using the well known cohesion metrics. The obtained results illustrate that the proposed cohesion metric has the highest discrimination power with a vast difference over all the existing cohesion metrics. Therefore, it is highly recommended to use the proposed metric for evaluating the software design quality.