Using Design Cohesion to Visualize, Quantify, and Restructure Software.
Byung-Kyoo Kang, James M. Bieman · 1996
During design or maintenance, software developers often use intuition, rather than an objective set of criteria, to determine or recapture the design structure of a software system. A decision process based on intuition alone can miss alternative design options that are easier to implement, test, maintain, and reuse. The concept of design-level cohesion can provide both visual and quantitative guidance for comparing alternative software designs. The visual support can supplement human intuition; an ordinal design-level cohesion measure provides objective criteria for comparing alternative design structures. The process for visualizing and quantifying design-level cohesion can be readily automated and can be used to re-engineer software. Index terms --- cohesion, software design, software maintenance, software visualization, software measurement and metrics, software restructuring and re-engineering, software reuse, measurement theory. 1 Introduction Poorly structured software design...