A New Design Based Software Coupling Metric

The increasing need for software quality measurements has led to extensive research into software metrics and the development of software metric tools. Creating components which are reusable is seen as one of the best practice in industry today. To create reusable components the dependency between each component should be as low as possible. Hence, to maintain high quality software, developers need to strive for a low-coupled and highly cohesive design. However, as mentioned by many researchers, coupling and cohesion metrics lack formal and standardized definitions and thus for each metric there is more than one interpretation. This paper introduces our view of measurement of coupling for Java projects and our implementation approach. Coupling metrics are calculated at class level by considering the relationships between the methods of classes.