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Quantitatively measuring object-oriented couplings

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Abstract

One key to several quality factors of software is the way components are connected. Software coupling can be used to estimate a number of quality factors, including maintainability, complexity, and reliability. Object-oriented languages are designed to reduce the number of dependencies among classes, which encourages separation of concerns and should reduce the amount of coupling. At the same time, the object-oriented language features change the way the connections are made, how they must be analyzed, and how they are measured. This paper discusses software couplings based on object-oriented relationships between classes, specifically focusing on types of couplings that are not available until after the implementation is completed, and presents a static analysis tool that measures couplings among classes in Java packages. Data from evaluating the tool on several open-source projects are provided. The coupling measurement is based on source code, which has the advantage of being quantitative and more precise than previous measures, but the disadvantage of not being available before implementation, and thus not useful for some predictive efforts.

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Notes

  1. Online at http://www.uml.org/.

  2. Online at: http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/jakarta-servletapi-5/.

  3. Online at: http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/.

  4. Online at: http://www.antlr.org/download.html.

  5. Online at: http://ostermiller.org/tulipchain/.

  6. Online at: http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity/.

  7. Online at: http://linux.cs.lewisu.edu/apache/jakarta/tapestry/source/3.0-beta-1/.

  8. The developer, Terence Parr at University of San Francisco, explained via email that version 2 had significant problems, which recently motivated him to write version 3.

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Acknowledgments

This work was sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation under grant number CCR-0097056. Offutt and Abdurazik were sponsored in part by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Software Diagnostics and Conformance Testing Division (SDCT) in support of its standards and conformance testing program. Thanks to Terence Parr, the developer of ANTLR, for the tool and for quick answers to our pushy questions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information and Software Engineering Department, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 22030, USA

    Jeff Offutt & Aynur Abdurazik

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, 37235, USA

    Stephen R. Schach

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  1. Jeff Offutt
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Correspondence to Jeff Offutt.

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Offutt, J., Abdurazik, A. & Schach, S.R. Quantitatively measuring object-oriented couplings. Software Qual J 16, 489–512 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-008-9051-x

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