Abstracts Category : Other

DEFINING AND VALIDATING A CLIENT-BASED CLASS COHESION METRICFOR OBJECT-ORIENTED SYSTEMS

by Musaad Alzahrani

Cohesion of a software module broadly refers to therelatedness of the elements of the module. A highly cohesive modulehas elements that contribute to a common purpose. Such modules arebelieved to be more understandable, maintainable, and testable.Most existing object-oriented class cohesion metrics measure thecohesion of a class based on internal connections between themethods of the class where two methods are internally connected ifthey both reference common attributes in the class. In thisresearch, we propose a client-based class cohesion metric which wename CCC and which measures the cohesion of a class based on howits public methods are used by its clients. The requiredinformation for CCC to calculate the cohesion of a class can beextracted during the high-level design phase from class andcommunication diagrams defined by the Unified Modeling Language(UML). We validate the proposed metric theoretically, and weempirically demonstrate its usefulness. Theoretically, we analyzethe compliance of CCC with the cohesion metric properties.Empirically, we analyze the extent to which fourteen class cohesionmetrics, including CCC, can individually and in combination predictclass maintainability and testability. Our results show that CCCcan be used individually to predict class maintainability andtestability and that CCC can be used as a useful complementary toother class cohesion metrics to better predict classmaintainability and testability.Advisors/Committee Members: Melton, Austin (Advisor).