Measuring Software Component Reusability by Coupling and Cohesion Metrics

This paper proposes a set of new static metrics of coupling and cohesion developed to assess the reusability of Java components retrieved from the Internet by a software component search engine. These metrics differ from the majority of established metrics in three respects: they measure the degree to which entities are coupled or resemble each other, they quantitatively take account of indirect coupling and cohesion relationship and they also reflect the functional complexity of classes and methods. An empirical comparison of the new metrics with eight established metrics is described. Results show the new metrics are consistently superior at measuring and ranking the reusability of software components.