Measuring the intensity of object coupling in C++ programs

Software metrics increase our ability to understand the behavior of software systems. An accurate measurement provides us with solid understanding of the entity we are measuring. In Object Oriented software, most current metrics quantify a class's coupling complexity by simply counting the number of connections with other classes but such metrics are unable to capture the underlying complexity or tension of individual connections. In this paper we propose a technique for measuring the strength of interclass relationships that takes into account both the number of statements participating in the connection, as well as the complexity of those statements. Our approach introduces a new concept for measuring Object Oriented coupling complexity and provides a more sensitive measurement than traditional approaches. We present examples in C++ to support our method.