The Conceptual Coupling Metrics for Object-Oriented Systems

Coupling in software has been linked with maintainability and existing metrics are used as predictors of external software quality attributes such as fault-proneness, impact analysis, ripple effects of changes, changeability, etc. Many coupling measures for object-oriented (OO) software have been proposed, each of them capturing specific dimensions of coupling. This paper presents a new set of coupling measures for OO systems - named conceptual coupling, based on the semantic information obtained from the source code, encoded in identifiers and comments. A case study on open source software systems is performed to compare the new measures with existing structural coupling measures. The case study shows that the conceptual coupling captures new dimensions of coupling, which are not captured by existing coupling measures; hence it can be used to complement the existing metrics