Cohesion as Software Design Decisive Measure: A Metric Approach

Abstract

The requirements for developing software belongs to different domains in the current scenario keep evolving due to the instant changes and demand in the market. Hence, software design flexibility is a big challenge for the design architects to incorporate the changes as it occurs. The requirements gathered according to changes are grouped and implemented as modules which have their own responsibilities. Designing a module with complete functionality and integrating them is yet another challenge. Measuring such modules during design is therefore essential to make the final product qualitative. Further, it is worth to recall that quality of design is influenced by external quality attributes such as Cohesion, coupling, maintainability, scalability and so on. Further, cohesion concept is a qualitative indicator which decides the depth of design quality in any project. Therefore, this paper highlights on the impact of cohesion on design quality of a complex system and its measures to quantify the overall quality of software. NormalizationGiven a software part sp, the metric cohesion (sp) belongs to a specified interval [0,Max], and cohesion(sp) = 0 if and only if CI(sp) is empty, and cohesion(sp) = Max if and only if CI(sp) includes all possible cohesive interactions.