skip to main content
research-article

Measuring class cohesion using mutant methods

Published: 27 November 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Class cohesion is a measure of software quality and maintainability. A highly cohesive class implies that its modules are functionally coherent and integrated. To date, there are varying cohesion metrics that measure class cohesion from different perspectives. These metrics use different computation in the evaluation of class cohesion. Novice software developers have no access to the class cohesion of a particular class if they are not familiar with these metrics. In this paper, we provide a quick technique to measure class cohesion without using complicated calculation. We delimit our technique to measure class cohesion in term of attribute sharing and method invocation. We contend that the observation of the impact of mutant methods provides a quick judgement on the cohesion status. The proposed approach enables novice software developers to quickly evaluate the cohesion status of a class

References

[1]
Simon, F., Loffler, S., and Lewerentz, C. 1999. Distance Based Cohesion Measuring. In FESMA, Amsterdam. Pp 1--18.
[2]
Meyers, T.M., and Binkley, D. 2004. Slice-Based Cohesion Metrics and Software Intervention. In Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE¿04).
[3]
Do, H., and Rothermel, G. 2006. On the Use of Mutation Faults in Empirical Assessments of Test Case Prioritization Techniques. In IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol 32, No 9. Pp 733--752.
[4]
Chae, H.S., and Kwon, Y.R. 2004. Improving Cohesion Metrics for Classes by Considering Dependent Instance Variables. In IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol 30, No 11. Pp 826--832.
[5]
Briand, L.C., Daly, J.W., and Wüst, J. 1998. A Unified Framework for Cohesion Measurement in Object-Oriented Systems. In Empirical Software Engineering, 3, 1998. Pp 65--117.
[6]
Bieman, J.M., Ghosh, S., and Alexander, R.T. 2001. A Technique for Mutation of Java Objects. In Proceedings of Automated Software Engineering Conference (ASE 2001). Pp 337--340.

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes  Volume 35, Issue 6
November 2010
132 pages
ISSN:0163-5948
DOI:10.1145/1874391
Issue’s Table of Contents

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 November 2010
Published in SIGSOFT Volume 35, Issue 6

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. class cohesion
  2. mutant methods
  3. mutant operators

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • 0
    Total Citations
  • 111
    Total Downloads
  • Downloads (Last 12 months)0
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 15 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media