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Selected publications by date
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A Software Metric System for Module Coupling
Journal of Systems Software vol. 20, no. 3,
pp. 295-308, March 1993.
A. Jefferson Offutt, Mary Jean Harrold and Priyadarshan Kolte
Abstract
Low module coupling is considered to be a desirable quality for modular programs to
have.
Previously, coupling has been defined subjectively, and not quantified, making it difficult
to use in practice.
In this paper, we extend previous work to reflect newer programming languages, and quantify
coupling by developing a general software metric system that allows us to
automatically measure coupling.
We have precisely defined the levels of coupling so that they can be determined algorithmically,
incorporated the notion of direction into the coupling levels, and accounted for different types
of non-local variables present in modern programming languages.
With our system, we can measure the coupling between all pairs of modules in
a system, measure the coupling of a particular module with all other
modules in a system, and measure the coupling of an entire system.
We have implemented our metric system so that it measures the coupling
between pairs of procedures in arbitrary C programs and have analyzed several well-used systems of
various sizes.
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