An Automatic Approach to Measure and Visualize Coupling in Object-Oriented Programs

The task of measuring coupling in software systems is important to evaluate the software quality such as maintainability and reusability. The software engineers and developers spend much time and effort in order to accomplish this task. Measuring the coupling automatically helps in getting rid of the manual measurement inadequacy. In this paper, we proposed an approach to automatically measure and visualize the coupling among classes of object-oriented programs. The generated representations provide an overall recognition of the coupling in an effective and interactive way. The approach parses the program source code, using an existing tool, into an XML file, and extracts the class tokens according to the definitions of the coupling metrics. Then, it determines the coupling relationships through matching these tokens with other classes tokens. Finally, it generates interactive visualizations of the coupling utilizing several charts. A case study has been conducted to validate the proposed approach. The results indicated that the generated visualizations facilitate a comprehensive realization of the program coupling, and leads to a proper estimation of the software quality in terms of its coupling measure.