Program execution based module cohesion measurement

Module cohesion describes the degree to which dier-ent actions performed by a module contribute towards a unied function. High module cohesion is a desirable property of a program. The program modications dur-ing successive maintenance interventions can have neg-ative eect on the structure of the program resulting in less cohesive modules. Therefore, metrics that measure module cohesion are important for software restructur-ing during maintenance. The existing static slice based module cohesion metrics signicantly overestimate co-hesion due to the limitations of static slicing. In this paper, we present a novel program execu-tion based approach to measure module cohesion of legacy software. We dene cohesion metrics based on de nition-use pairs in the dynamic slices of the out-puts. Our approach signicantly improves the accuracy of cohesion measurement. We implemented our tech-nique and measured module cohesion for several pro-grams. Cohesion measurements using our technique were found to be more insightful than static slice based measurements