Dynamic coupling measurement of object oriented software using trace events

Software metrics are increasingly playing a central role in the planning and control of software development projects. Coupling measures have important applications in software development and maintenance. They are used to reason about the structural complexity of software and have been shown to predict quality attributes such as fault-proneness, ripple effects of changes and changeability. Coupling or dependency is the degree to which each program module relies on each one of the other modules. Coupling measures characterize the static usage dependencies among the classes in an object-oriented system. Traditional coupling measures take into account only "static" couplings. They do not account for "dynamic" couplings due to polymorphism and may significantly underestimate the complexity of software and misjudge the need for code inspection, testing and debugging. This is expected to result in poorer predictive accuracy of the quality models that utilize static coupling measurement. In this paper, We propose dynamic coupling measurement techniques. First the source code is introspected and all the functions are added with some trace events. Then the source code is compiled and allowed to run. During runtime the trace events are logged. This log report provides the actual function call information (AFCI) during the runtime. Based on AFCI the source code is filtered to arrive the actual runtime used source code (ARUSC). The ARUSC is then given for any standard coupling technique to get the dynamic coupling.