An Approach to Automatically Measure and Visualize Class Cohesion in Object-Oriented Systems

Developing systems with high quality is the motto of software engineering. In object-oriented systems, class cohesion is a significant quality attribute that impacts other quality attributes such as maintainability and reusability. Much time and effort are needed to be spent by the software engineers and developers in order to measure cohesion. Measuring cohesion automatically aids in getting over the manual measurement problem. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically measure and visualize the cohesion within classes of object-oriented programs. The generated representations give an overall realization of the cohesion in an effective and interactive way. The approach parses the program source code, using an existing tool, into an XML file, and extracts the class tokens according to the definitions of the cohesion metrics. Then, it determines the cohesion relationships through matching these tokens with some class features. Finally, it generates interactive visualizations of the cohesion utilizing several charts. The proposed approach has been validated by conducting a case study. The results showed that the generated visualizations provide a comprehensive recognition of the program cohesion, and facilitate a proper estimation of the software quality based on its cohesion degree.