MEASURING DESIGN-LEVEL COHESION

Cohesion was first introduced as a software attribute that, when measu red, could be used to predict properties of implementations that would be created from a given design. Unfortunately, cohesion, as originall y defined, could not be objectively assessed, while more recently deve loped objective cohesion measures depend on code-level information. We show that association-based and slice-based approaches can be used to measure cohesion using only design-level information. An analytical a nd empirical analysis shows that the design-level measures correspond closely with code-level cohesion measures. They can be used as predict ors of or surrogates for the code-level measures. The design-level coh esion measures are formally defined, have been implemented, and can su pport software design, maintenance, and restructuring.