Improving Cohesion of a Software System by Performing Usage Pattern Based Clustering

Increasing the software design quality is a key research challenge in object-oriented software development system. Cohesion is one of the key spect that helps to evaluate the quality and modularity of a software system at the design level. It helps to create software components that are directly reusable to the industry because of their less dependence on other components. In this paper, a new cohesion metric for object-oriented software, named as Usage Pattern Based Cohesion (UPBC), is proposed which is computed at the module level. This paper considers class as a module initially and subsequently group of classes (i.e. a package) is considered as a module with an aim of improving overall cohesion. This metric utilizes the Frequent Usage Patterns (FUP) extracted from different member functions interactions to capture the cohesiveness of the module. Further, the measured cohesion value is used to perform clustering of modules in order to increase cohesion and decrease coupling among modules simultaneously. The clustering is performed by using a newly proposed clustering algorithm called FUPClust (Frequent Usage Pattern based Clustering) based on FUP interactions among modules. The proposed approach is applied to two Java software systems and the results obtained show a significant improvement in the cohesiveness of the software system.

کلیدواژه ها:

Software Engineering ، Clustering ، Frequent Usage Patterns (FUP) ، Cohesion