Identifying Coupling Metrics and Impact on Software Quality

Coupling in software has been linked with maintainability and existing metrics are used as predictors of external software quality attribute such as fault-proneness, impact analysis, ripple effect of changes, changeability etc. Measurement helps in establishing these factors and hence the quality of a work product. Metric helps in deriving indicators from a collection of measures that can be used for analyzing and improving the quality baselines. Many coupling measures for object oriented software have been proposed each of them capturing specific dimensions of coupling. Coupling is considered by many to be an important concept in measuring design quality. Much of the existing work concentrates on direct coupling, that is, form of coupling that exists between entities that are directly related to each other. A form of coupling that has so far received little attention is indirect coupling, which is coupling between entities that are indirectly related. This paper identifies different coupling metrics both direct and indirect coupling metrics and study the impact on software quality. KeywordObject Oriented, coupling, indirect coupling, transitive closure, software defect