An Evaluation Framework for Package-Level Cohesion Metrics

Despite package cohesion metrics play a crucial role in guiding software packaging and analyzing the maintainability and reusability of software, the research on this area is little focus. There has been a number of attempts to propose framework for assessment the cohesion metrics but at class level. In this paper we survey the existing package cohesion metrics and present an attribute-based framework to evaluate these metrics. The framework is meant to guide researchers interested in proposing new package metrics. The paper discusses a number of package cohesion metrics against the framework. Analysis of the discussion suggests open points for future research.