Cohesion Metric for Object-Oriented Systems Based on Semantic Closeness From Disambiguity

Object-oriented semantic metrics address software quality by assessing underlying code meaning. Previous metrics were based on mapping a class's semantic information onto concepts in an application domain knowledge base. Quality measurements were made by operating on the concepts mapped onto. In this work, we consider more complex inter-concept relationships—semantic disambiguities through semantic connections. The idea is that a level of ambiguity is indicated by the connectivity within the knowledge base between two concepts. A cohesion metric based on this idea is shown to perform as well as traditional metrics, and is available much earlier in the development cycle.