Parametric and Functional-Based Analysis of Object-Oriented Dynamic Coupling Metrics

Abstract

Software coupling is considered one of the most crucial issues in the software industry. The measurement of coupling gives a quantitative indication of internal features that are correlated to external quality attributes such as reliability, maintainability, extendibility, functionality and usability of the software. Various static and dynamic metrics have been proposed by several academicians and industry experts to evaluate software coupling. Although the values of static metrics can be easily extracted from the source code without its execution, researchers have emphasized the significance of dynamic metrics over static metrics in terms of program comprehensibility, change proneness, maintainability, etc. This chapter presents some of the dynamic coupling measures and their comparative analysis: (a) parametric-based analysis of six parameters, i.e. quality focus, measured entity, theoretical validation, dynamic analysis approach, environment, and statistical analysis technique; (b) functional-based analysis. Only those metrics which possess the required amount of information have been considered in order to make a meaningful comparison possible. Based on the comparison, the observed results reveal that empirical validation conducted for the evaluation of dynamic coupling metrics is not adequate to make them applicable to industries.