Improving Class Cohesion Measurement: Towards a Novel Approach Using Hierarchical Clustering

Lazhar Sadaoui, Mourad Badri, Linda Badri

Software Engineering Research Laboratory, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Quebec, Trois-Rivières, Canada.

DOI: 10.4236/jsea.2012.57051                

Abstract

Class cohesion is considered as one of the most important object-oriented software attributes. High cohesion is, in fact, a desirable property of software. Many different metrics have been suggested in the last several years to measure the cohesion of classes in object-oriented systems. The class of structural object-oriented cohesion metrics is the most in-vestigated category of cohesion metrics. These metrics measure cohesion on structural information extracted from the source code. Empirical studies noted that these metrics fail in many situations to properly reflect cohesion of classes. This paper aims at exploring the use of hierarchical clustering techniques to improve the measurement of cohesion of classes in object-oriented systems. The proposed approach has been evaluated using three particular case studies. We also used in our study three well-known structural cohesion metrics. The achieved results show that the new approach appears to better reflect the cohesion (and structure) of classes than traditional structural cohesion metrics.

Keywords

Object-Oriented; Classes; Cohesion; Similarity; Clustering; Metrics and Empirical Evaluation

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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