ASSESSMENT OF COUPLING AND COHESION FOR COMPONENT-BASED SOFTWARE BY USING SHANNON LANGUAGES

Component-Based Software (CBS) engineering is envisioned to address the issues related to the increasing size and complexity of software systems. In CBS development, the designer designs systems by using readily available (possibly third party) software components without needing the source code for the components. Lack of source code, in general, renders the classical metrics cumbersome to use, if not useless. Coupling and cohesion aspects of a system/subsystem are the quality attributes that can seriously impact the maintenance, evolution, and reuse. We present an information-theoretic approach based on the notion of Shannon Languages for helping the system designer in the assessment of coupling and cohesion early in the design phase. The proposed methodology is most beneficial for CBS (where the source code is in general absent) however it is applicable in other development methodologies in which the source code for the software components is available.