Towards a metrics suite for object oriented design
OOPSLA '91 Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications
Cohesion and reuse in an object-oriented system
SSR '95 Proceedings of the 1995 Symposium on Software reusability
A Unified Framework for Cohesion Measurement in Object-OrientedSystems
Empirical Software Engineering
Replicated Case Studies for Investigating Quality Factorsin Object-Oriented Designs
Empirical Software Engineering
A Metrics Suite for Object Oriented Design
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Empirical Validation of Object-Oriented Metrics on Open Source Software for Fault Prediction
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
The interpretation and utility of three cohesion metrics for object-oriented design
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
Metrics for class cohesion and similarity between methods
Proceedings of the 44th annual Southeast regional conference
Using the Conceptual Cohesion of Classes for Fault Prediction in Object-Oriented Systems
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Theoretical validation of object-oriented lack-of-cohesion metrics
SEPADS'09 Proceedings of the 8th WSEAS International Conference on Software engineering, parallel and distributed systems
An object-oriented high-level design-based class cohesion metric
Information and Software Technology
Improving the applicability of object-oriented class cohesion metrics
Information and Software Technology
Measuring the Discriminative Power of Object-Oriented Class Cohesion Metrics
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
A Precise Method-Method Interaction-Based Cohesion Metric for Object-Oriented Classes
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
Information and Software Technology
Improving the applicability of object-oriented class cohesion metrics
Information and Software Technology
CIMMACS'11/ISP'11 Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS international conference on Computational Intelligence, Man-Machine Systems and Cybernetics, and proceedings of the 10th WSEAS international conference on Information Security and Privacy
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Classes are the basic units in object-oriented programs, and therefore, their quality has impact on the overall quality of the software. Class cohesion is a key quality factor, and it refers to the degree of relatedness of class attributes and methods. Software developers use class cohesion measure to assess the quality of their products and to guide the restructuring of poorly designed classes. Several class cohesion metrics are proposed in the literature, and the impact of considering the special methods (i.e., constructors, destructors, and access methods) in cohesion calculation is not empirically studied for most of them. In this paper, we address this issue for one of the most popular class cohesion metrics, referenced as Lack of Cohesion (LCOM). Our empirical study involves applying the metric with and without considering special methods on classes of two open source Java applications and statistically analyzing the results. The empirical study results show that the ability of LCOM in indicating class quality slightly improves when excluding special methods from the LCOM computation.