Evolution of Object Oriented Coupling Metrics: A Sampling of 25 Years of Research

Abstract

Coupling is one of the most important properties that affect the quality of the design and implementation of a software system. In the context of object oriented software development, coupling metrics and their impact on quality attributes have been investigated for a quarter of a century. In this work we review and critically analyze the developments in this domain by considering 26 of the most influential research papers addressing object oriented coupling. Our analysis reveals that a very strong theoretical background has been already developed but unfortunately without a clear impact on the industry practices and software analysis tooling. Even more, recent developments fail to address this problem and seem to even contribute to increasing this gap. We argue that the direction of current research should be shifted towards systematizing and evaluating existing results rather than exploring new applicability domains and defining new metric suites.