An empirical study on the developers' perception of software coupling

  • Authors:

  • Gabriele Bavota;Bogdan Dit;Rocco Oliveto;Massimiliano Di Penta;Denys Poshyvanyk;Andrea De Lucia

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Salerno, Italy;College of William and Mary, USA;University of Molise, Italy;University of Sannio, Italy;College of William and Mary, USA;University of Salerno, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Coupling is a fundamental property of software systems, and numerous coupling measures have been proposed to support various development and maintenance activities. However, little is known about how developers actually perceive coupling, what mechanisms constitute coupling, and if existing measures align with this perception. In this paper we bridge this gap, by empirically investigating how class coupling---as captured by structural, dynamic, semantic, and logical coupling measures---aligns with developers' perception of coupling. The study has been conducted on three Java open-source systems---namely ArgoUML, JHotDraw and jEdit---and involved 64 students, academics, and industrial practitioners from around the world, as well as 12 active developers of these three systems. We asked participants to assess the coupling between the given pairs of classes and provide their ratings and some rationale. The results indicate that the peculiarity of the semantic coupling measure allows it to better estimate the mental model of developers than the other coupling measures. This is because, in several cases, the interactions between classes are encapsulated in the source code vocabulary, and cannot be easily derived by only looking at structural relationships, such as method calls.