A Method to Extract Indirect Coupling and Measure Its Complexity
José Navas-Sú, Antonio González-Torres · 2018
The process of software change requires programmers to understand the structure of the systems and the effect that is produced by the modifications they make. Overall, programmers need effective methods to trace the dependencies between components, to control the evolution of quality and to understand changes. Therefore, the extraction of coupling is a valuable input to enable developers in the analysis of changes to perform additional modifications in a successful manner. Consequently, this research proposes a method to extract indirect coupling and to measure the complexity of the call chains and their conforming entities. The extraction of coupling chains is carried out using static analysis and the Abstract Syntax Trees (AST) of languages. The method is aimed to support programmers in understanding the internals of systems and how modifications influence the complexity and quality of software. The paper explains the main concepts of direct and indirect coupling, the proposed approach and presents the results obtained, which show that implementation and testing of the method were successful.