An Empirical Investigation of the Correlation between Package-Level Cohesion and Maintenance Effort

The quality of the software design has a considerable impact on software maintainability. Improving software quality can reduce costs and efforts of software maintenance. Cohesion, as one of software quality characteristics, can be used as an early indicator for predicting software maintenance efforts. This paper improves Martin’s cohesion metric, which is one of the well-known and well-accepted cohesion metrics. The strong correlation found between package cohesion, using our proposed metric, and maintenance efforts shows the improvement made on measuring cohesion, and how it would be for predicting maintenance efforts. The experimental study included data from four open source Java software systems. The results show that as good the package cohesion is, as the less maintenance effort will be needed.

@article{Albattah2017,
  title     = {An Empirical Investigation of the Correlation between Package-Level Cohesion and Maintenance Effort},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {8},
  number    = {3},
  year      = {2017},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Waleed Albattah},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2017.080327},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2017.080327}
}