Assessing the quality of abstract data types written in ADA

  • Authors:

  • D. W. Embley;S. N. Woodfield

  • Affiliations:

  • Brigham Young Univ., Provo, UT;Brigham Young Univ., Provo, UT

  • Venue:
  • ICSE '88 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Software engineering
  • Year:
  • 1988

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Abstract

As software systems have become more complex, a search for better abstraction mechanisms has led to the use of abstract data types (ADTs). To more appropriately use ADTs, however, it is imperative that their properties and characteristics be understood. In this paper we present a method of assessing the quality of ADTs in terms of cohesion and coupling. We argue that an ADT that contains and exports only one domain and exports only operations that pertain to that domain has the best cohesive properties, and we argue that ADTs that make neither explicit nor implicit assumptions about other ADTs in the system have the best coupling properties. Formal definitions are presented for each of the cohesion and coupling characteristics discussed. Their application to Ada® packages is also investigated, and we show how a tool can be developed to assess the quality of an Ada package that represents an ADT. We analyzed nearly one hundred Ada ADT packages found in Ada text books, articles about Ada, and student projects and discovered that more than half of them had inferior cohesive characteristics and almost half of them allowed inferior coupling characteristics.