A Novel Coupling Metric for Object-Oriented Software Systems

Over the last four decades, particular interest in software complexities is how to measure and control coupling interactions of the various parts of object-oriented (OO) systems. This paper introduces a novel coupling metric, called global coupling metric, to evaluate coupling interactions between classes of object-oriented systems. The metric differs from the majority of existing metrics in two aspects: it takes into account the strength that one class is dependent on another, it reflects indirect coupling. An empirical comparison of the novel metric with one of the most widely used coupling metrics is described.