International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies- CompSysTech’06 Observations on Lack of Cohesion Metrics

Abstract: Lack of Cohesion Metric (LCOM) is perhaps the most used metric when trying to measure the goodness of a class written in some object-oriented language. We apply the basic LCOM metric to the Java SDK 5.0 and Eclipse libraries. LCOM gives a bad value for most of the classes. We study the reasons and characterize sets of classes for which one should not apply LCOM to determine the goodness of an implementation. Yet, one of the major reasons for bad LCOM value is observed to be its dependence on the measured class size. Normalization in this respect is considered