Problems with determining package cohesion and coupling

Rising, Linda; Calliss, F.W.

doi:10.1002/spe.4380220705

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Good packages should group conceptually coupled classes, i.e., which are needed for the same task [15], and they should have a few clear dependencies to other packages [3,11]. In such a context, cohesion and coupling are among the most used metrics during perfective maintenance [13,1,16].…”

Section: Challenges In Understanding Packagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Package Reference Fingerprint: a Rich and Compact Visualization to Understand Package Relationships

Abdeen

Alloui

Ducasse

et al. 2008

2008 12th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering

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Object-oriented languages such as Java, Smalltalk, and C++ structure their programs using packages, allowing classes to be organized into named abstractions. Maintainers of large applications need to understand how packages are structured and how they relate to each other, but this task is very complex because packages often have multiple clients and different roles (class container, code ownership...). Cohesion and coupling are still among the most used metrics, because they help identify candidate packages for restructuring; however, they do not help maintainers understand the structure and interrelationships between packages. In this paper, we present the package fingerprint, a 2D visualization of the references made to and from a package. The proposed visualization offers a semantically rich, but compact and zoomable visualization centered on packages. We focus on two views (incoming and outgoing references) that help users understand how the package under analysis is used by the system and how it uses the system. We applied these views on three large case studies: JBoss, Azureus, and ArgoUML.

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Section: Challenges In Understanding Packagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ideally, packages should be kept as less coupled and as much cohesive as possible [3]. Following previous overviews [16,13,1,15], we distinguish two main design approaches. The first approach relates the cohesion of a package to the interconnections between its internal classes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Package Reference Fingerprint: a Rich and Compact Visualization to Understand Package Relationships

Abdeen

Alloui

Ducasse

et al. 2008

2008 12th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Ideally, packages should be kept as less coupled and as much cohesive as possible [BDW99b,ABF04]. We distinguish two main approaches of package cohesion in the existing literature [RC92,MT07,AGa01,PN06]. The first approach defines the cohesion of a package in terms of the interconnections between its internal classes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Package Fingerprints: A visual summary of package interface usage

Abdeen

Ducasse

Pollet

et al. 2010

Information and Software Technology

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Context: Object-oriented languages such as Java, Smalltalk, and C++ structure their programs using packages. Maintainers of large systems need to understand how packages relate to each other, but this task is complex because packages often have multiple clients and play different roles (class container, code ownership. . . ). Several approaches have been proposed, among which the use of cohesion and coupling metrics. Such metrics help identify candidate packages for restructuring; however, they do not help maintainers actually understand the structure and interrelationships between packages.Objectives: In this paper, we use pre-attentive processing as the basis for package visualization and see to what extent it could be used in package understanding.Method: We present the package fingerprint, a 2D visualization of the references made to and from a package. The proposed visualization offers a semantically rich, but compact and zoomable views centered on packages. We focus on two views (incoming and outgoing references) that help users understand how the package under analysis is used by the system and how it uses the system.Results: We applied these views on four large systems: Squeak, JBoss, Azureus, and ArgoUML. We obtained several interesting results, among which, the identification of a set of recurring visual patterns that help maintainers: (a) more easily identify the role of and the way a package is used within the system (e.g., the package under analysis provides a set of layered services), and, (b) detect either problematic situations (e.g., a single package that groups together a large number of basic services) or opportunities for better package restructuring (e.g., removing cyclic dependencies among packages). The visualization generally scaled well and the detection of different patterns was always possible.Conclusion: The proposed visualizations and patterns proved to be useful in understanding and maintaining the different systems we addressed. To generalize to other contexts and systems, a real user study is required.

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“…Existing techniques can measure or assess the cohesion of procedural code [5], [9], [2], structured design documents [15], [16], packages [13], [12], [3], and classes [4], [14], [1]. Our objective is to develop techniques to objectively measure cohesion in terms of information available from the detailed design of modules in procedural programs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring design-level cohesion

Bieman

Kang

1998

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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Cohesion was first introduced as a software attribute that, when measured, could be used to predict properties of implementations that would be created from a given design. Unfortunately, cohesion, as originally defined, could not be objectively assessed, while more recently developed objective cohesion measures depend on code-level information. We show that association-based and slice-based approaches can be used to measure cohesion using only design-level information. An analytical and empirical analysis shows that the design-level measures correspond closely with code-level cohesion measures. They can be used as predictors of or surrogates for the code-level measures. The design-level cohesion measures are formally defined, have been implemented, and can support software design, maintenance, and restructuring.

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Problems with determining package cohesion and coupling

Cited by 9 publications

References 13 publications

Package Reference Fingerprint: a Rich and Compact Visualization to Understand Package Relationships

Package Reference Fingerprint: a Rich and Compact Visualization to Understand Package Relationships

Package Fingerprints: A visual summary of package interface usage

Measuring design-level cohesion

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