Program Execution-Based Module Cohesion Measurement

  • Authors:

  • Neelam Gupta;Praveen Rao

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 16th IEEE international conference on Automated software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Module cohesion describ es the degree to which different actions performed by a module contribute towardsa unified function. High module cohesion is a desirableproperty of a program. The program modifications during successive maintenance interventions can have negative effect on the structure of the program resulting inless cohesive modules. Therefore, metrics that measuremodule cohesion are important for software restructuring during maintenance. The existing static slice basedmodule cohesionmetrics significantly over estimate cohesion due to the limitations of static slicing.In this paper, we present a novel program execution based approach to measure module cohesion oflegacy software. We define cohesion metrics base downdefinition-use pairs in the dynamic slices of the outputs. Our approach significantly improves the accuracyof cohesion measurement. We implemented our technique and measured module cohesion for several programs. Cohesion measurements using our techniquewere found to be more insightful than static slice basedmeasurements.