An Approach to Measuring the Component Cohesion Based on Structure Entropy

The component plays an essential role in the component-based software engineering. The component cohesion is an important attribute in software system, which represents the tight degree of a component. Obviously, the high cohesion of a component can effectively improve software quality. However, it is difficult to measure the component cohesion. In this paper the concept of structure entropy and the software component is firstly overviewed. Secondly, the dependence relations in the component and the component dependence graph (CDG) are presented, and the component dependence graph (CDG) is made up of three sub-graph: IPTG, TOPG and TTG. Finally, based on component dependence graph and the concept of structure entropy, an approach is proposed to measure the component cohesion.