Comparison of High Level Design Based Class Cohesion Metrics

Class cohesion is an object-oriented software quality attribute and refers to the extent to which the members of a class are related. It is one of the fundamental measures of the goodness of a software design. Software developers use class cohesion measures to assess the quality of their products and to guide the restructuring of poorly developed software. To obtain a more comprehensive and maintainable software, it is important to assess class cohesion during the design phase. It means measuring cohesion during the high level design (HLD) of the software. Several cohesion metrics has been developed till date based on the design phase. This paper reviews the works done on class cohesion metrics. The paper highlights the mathematical properties that all class cohesion metrics should satisfy. We will compare the available high level class cohesion metrics on the basis of these properties. In the end, a conclusion is drawn about the extent of validity of all these metrics.