Experimental Evaluation of Agreement among Programmers in Applying the Rules of Cohesion
✍ Scribed by Nandigam, Jagadeesh; Lakhotia, Arun; Čech, Claude G.
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 195 KB
- Volume
- 11
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1040-550X
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The cohesion or strength of a component of a software system is an indicator of its maintainability. The most popular way-as evidenced from coverage in textbooks-of determining the cohesion of a component is a set of rules developed by Stevens, Myers, Constantine and Yourdon in the early 1970s. Using Stevens et al.'s approach, a component is assigned one of seven levels of cohesion. This paper presents the results of an experiment analysing these rules of cohesion. The experiment, using fifteen computer science graduate students as subjects, was conducted to assess whether Stevens et al.'s rules were objective, i.e., whether there is a better-than-chance agreement in the cohesion levels assigned by different programmers. The data, though preliminary due to the small sample size, indicate that there is a significant variation in the cohesion levels assigned by them even though the subjects were assessed to have understood the concepts well. This decoupling between the understanding of the concepts of the scale and of the use of the scale in proper fashion is intriguing and deserves further study. The results also raise questions about the precision of the material taught in the software engineering curriculum.