Exploring Empirically the Relationship Between Lack of Cohesion in Object-Oriented Systems and Coupling and Size

Abstract

The study presented in this paper aims at exploring empirically the relationship between lack of cohesion of classes in object-oriented systems and their coupling and size. We designed and conducted an empirical study on various open source Java software systems. The experiment has been conducted using several well known code-based metrics related to cohesion, coupling and size. The results of this study provide evidence that a lack of cohesion may actually be associated with (high) coupling and (large) size.