Plc reducer – a tool to generate possible reductions in coupling at design level

Abstract

Coupling and cohesion are the two prime attribute that define the quality of a software design. High coupling is an undesirable feature while higher cohesion is enviable property. A number of software quality parameters like maintainability, readability, understandability etc. are directly or indirectly related with coupling and cohesion and thus it become necessary to pay a great attention towards desirable degrees of coupling and cohesion during design phase of software development life cycle. In this paper, an algorithm PLCReducer is proposed that suggested the possibilities how the coupling can be reduced in a design and also generates a redesign for the designed software. A complete demonstration of algorithm functionality is shown for a project. Also, algorithm is applied on five different java based projects and the amount of coupling before and after applying the algorithm is shown in the paper.