Design-level cohesion measures: derivation, comparison, and applications

Abstract

Cohesion was first developed to predict properties of implementations 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. Our design level cohesion measures are formally defined, can be readily implemented, and can support software design, maintenance, and restructuring.