An aggregated coupling measure for the analysis of object-oriented software systems

Coupling is a fundamental property of software systems which is strongly connected with the quality of software design and has high impact on program understanding. The coupling between software components influences software maintenance and evolution as well. In order to ease the maintenance and evolution processes it is essential to estimate the impact of changes made in the software system, coupling indicating such a possible impact. This paper introduces a new aggregated coupling measurement which captures both the structural and the conceptual characteristics of coupling between the software components. The proposed measure combines the textual information contained in the source code with the structural relationships between software components. We conduct several experiments which underline that the proposed aggregated coupling measure reveals new characteristics of coupling and is also effective for change impact analysis.