Empirical Investigation of the Impact of Accounting for Transitive Relationships on Lack-of-Cohesion Measurement

Abstract: The quality of a class in object oriented system has a great impact on the overall quality of the software. Class cohesion, which refers to the degree of relatedness of the class members, is an important quality aspect. A few of class cohesion metrics, which are proposed in the literature, empirically address the impact of accounting for transitive relations between class attributes and methods caused by method invocations. This paper provides an empirical evaluation for the impact of considering transitive relationships on class cohesion quantified by one of the most popular class cohesion metrics, referenced as Lack of Cohesion (LCOM). The metric is applied with and without considering transitive relations on classes of two open source Java applications and the results are statistically analyzed. The results provide an evidence that the ability of LCOM in precisely indicating class quality enhances when accounting for both direct and transitive relations in the LCOM measurement.