Component Reusability and Cohesion Measures in Object-Oriented Systems

In software component reuse processing, the success of software systems is decided by the quality of components. One important characteristic to measure quality of components is component reusability. Component reusability measures how easily the component can be reused in a new environment. This paper provides a new measure of cohesion developed to assess the reusability of Java components retrieved from the internet by a search engine. This measure differs from the majority of established metrics in two respects: it reflects the degree of similarity between classes quantitatively, and they also take account of indirect similarities. An empirical comparison of the new measure with the established metrics is described. The new measures are shown to be consistently superior at ranking components according to their reusability.