A discriminant metric for module cohesion

  • Authors:

  • Thomas J. Emerson

  • Affiliations:

  • -

  • Venue:
  • ICSE '84 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Software engineering
  • Year:
  • 1984

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Abstract

The decomposition of a large program into modules can be guided by the use of a property called cohesion, first described by Constantine. Cohesion is a quality that describes the degree to which the different actions performed by a module contribute to a unified function. However, this technique may be difficult to apply due to the subjective nature of the definitions of levels of cohesion. In this paper a software metric is defined and proposed as a discriminant for classifying modules according to their cohesion. Formal properties of the metric are derived which can be used to set the metric value ranges for module classification.