Software Components’ Coupling Detection for Software Reusability

Abstract

Most of the software systems design and modeling techniques concentrates on capturing the functional aspects that comprise a system’s architecture. Non-functional aspects are rarely considered on most of the software system modeling and design techniques. One of the most important aspects of software component is reusability. Software reusability may be understood by identifying components’ dependence, which can be measured by measuring the coupling between system’s components. In this paper an approach to detect the coupling between software system’s components is introduced for the purpose of identifying software components’ reusability that may help in refining the system design. The proposed approach uses a dynamic notion of sequence diagram to understand the dynamic behavior of a software system. The notion of data and control dependence is used to detect the dependences among software components. The components’ dependences are identified in which one component contributes to the output computation of the other component. The results of the experiments show that the proposed algorithm can help the software engineers to understand the dependences among the software components and optimize the software system model by eliminating the unnecessary dependences among software components to enhance their cohesiveness. Such detection provides a better understanding of the software system model in terms of its components’ dependences and their influence on reusability, in which their elimination may enhance software reusability.