analysis of software cohesion attribute and test case development complexity
In this paper we report on some of our findings in our on-going research in relating Object Oriented code cohesion to test case development complexity. It is conjectured that the more cohesive the code is the easier it should be to develop test cases for the code. We studied a small ATM application software and measured the cohesion attribute using two existing cohesion metrics, LCOM5 and ITRA-C [6, 12, 14]. We then measured the test case development effort using TCD-Complexity metric [13]. Our measurements showed high correlation between ITRA-C and TCD-Complexity for OO Classes of relatively large size, but not between LCOM5 and TCD-Complexity. This result shows high potential for using certain code cohesion metric as an indicator for test complexity.
measurements cohesion metrics correlation test-case complexity design complexity