Relationship Between Cohesion and Coupling Metrics for Object-Oriented Systems

Abstract

Cohesion and coupling are regarded as fundamental features of the internal quality of object-oriented systems (OOS). Analyzing the relationships between cohesion and coupling metrics plays a significant role to develop efficient techniques for determining the external quality of an object-oriented system. Researchers have proposed several metrics to find cohesion and coupling in object-oriented systems. However, few of them have proposed an analysis of the relationship between cohesion and coupling. This paper empirically investigates the relationships among several cohesion and coupling metrics in object-oriented systems. This work attempts to find mutual relationships between those metrics by statistically analyzing the results of experiments. Three open-source Java systems were used for experimentation. The empirical study shows that cohesion and coupling metrics are inversely correlated.