Review and Evaluation of Cohesion and Coupling Metrics at Package and Subsystem Level

Cohesion and coupling metrics at package and subsystem level play a crucial role in guiding software packaging (partitioning) and analyzing the maintainability and reusability of software. There has been a number of attempts to propose frameworks to assess the cohesion and coupling metrics at class level. A little work has been done at a higher level. In this paper, we survey the existing cohesion and coupling metrics at package and subsystem level and present an attribute-based framework to assess these metrics. The framework is meant to guide researchers interested in proposing new metrics at package level. The paper discusses a number of metrics against the framework.