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A metric for package level coupling

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Abstract

Several software development activities are based on object oriented paradigm. Such software projects comprise of packages that are collection of correlated classes which can be reused. This reusability of a package depends on its cohesion and coupling strength. To determine the coupling and cohesion, there are several established metrics at the class level, but at the package level, such reliable and established metrics rarely exist. To address this important issue, a new metric, termed as package level coupling (PLC) is proposed in this paper. The metric estimates the quality, as well as reusability of the object-oriented software. The connections among these packages and sub-connections among the classes, related to different packages are used to determine the proposed metric, i.e., PLC. To establish the proposed metric, it is successfully experimented over four large java-based open source software comprising of multiple packages. Further, it is statistically correlated with the help of various parameters, i.e., number of sub-connections and number of classes of the package. The experimental results show a very weak correlation between the proposed PLC and the number of classes in the package. Spearman’s Rank correlation coefficient is used to illustrate the correlation between sub-connection and PLC. A smaller value of 0.108 is obtained signifying that there is no strong correlation between these two parameters. Further, a correlation between PLC and number of classes obtained is −0.061, signifying that these two parameters tends towards independency while other existing approaches are highly dependent on number of classes.

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  1. MNNIT, Allahabad, India

    Aprna Tripathi & D. S. Kushwaha

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  1. Aprna Tripathi
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  2. D. S. Kushwaha
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Correspondence to Aprna Tripathi.

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Tripathi, A., Kushwaha, D.S. A metric for package level coupling. CSIT 2, 217–233 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40012-015-0061-0

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