A cohesion metric approach to dividing source code into functional segments to improve maintainability

During software maintenance, understanding source code is one of time-consuming activities. Good programming practice suggests that programmers should insert blank lines to divide source code into functional segments, and a comment at the beginning of each functional segment. Those help developers to understand functional segmentation of source code, such as start and end points of each functional segment. Unfortunately, programmers do not always follow this practice. In this paper, we propose an approach to dividing source code into functional segments. Our approach uses cohesion metric for code portion to identify start and end points of each functional segment.