DRC: a dependence relationships based cohesion measure for classes

A large number of cohesion measures based on method-attribute references have been proposed. However, virtually no attention has been paid to the abstract representation that objectively depicts the relationships among the members of a class. Specially, the flow dependence relationship among attributes, the indirect and potential dependence relationships among class members, and the direction of method-attribute references are ignored. To address this problem, we first identifies four types of basic dependence relationships and uses a class member dependence graph to represent all dependences among the members of a class. Then, a dependence relationships based measure for measuring the class cohesiveness is proposed. Finally, we compare our class cohesion measure with typical cohesion measures.