This article compares and analyzes the definition and implementation variations of the LCOM metric, and provides an assessment of this metric

An automated tool to assist in the understanding of legacy code components can be useful both in the areas of software reuse and software maintenance. Most previous work in this area has concentrated on functionally-oriented code. Whereas objectoriented code has been shown to be inherently more reusable than functionally-oriented code, in many cases the eventual reuse of the object-oriented code was not considered during development. A knowledge-based, natural language processing approach to the automated understanding of object-oriented code as an aid to the reuse of object-oriented code is described. A system, called the PATRicia system (Program Analysis Tool for Reuse) that implements the approach is examined. The natural language processing/information extraction system that comprises a large part of the PATRicia system is discussed and the knowledge-base of the PATRicia system, in the form of conceptual graphs, is described. Reports provided by natural language-generation in the ...

Software reuse has been a long term goal of software developers. This goal has been rather elusive, but the widespread use of the object-oriented paradigm and other innovations in software development paradigms have led to renewed interest in this topic. This dissertation describes a new approach for the identification of reusable object-oriented legacy software components. The approach is concept-driven, knowledge-based and tool-assisted and uses heuristics to aid in the natural language understanding of comments and identifiers in object-oriented code. The approach uses a reusability quality factors hierarchy, where low-level object-oriented metrics are used to predict reusability quality factors.

In this report, we study the Lack of Cohesion in Methods (LCOM) metric for an object-oriented system and examine the suitability of eight variations of this metric through a principal component analysis. 1. Introduction One concern in software engineering is how high-quality software can be produced with predictable costs and time. Software metrics provide a quantitative means to predict the software development process and evaluate the quality of the software products. Several software metrics have been proposed to measure the complexity in the procedural paradigm. Some of the metrics which are frequently used in the procedural paradigm are McCabe's cyclomatic complexity metric [1] and Halstead's software science metric [2]. The object-oriented programming paradigm is often claimed to allow a faster development pace and higher quality of software. However, software metrics are less well studied in the object-oriented paradigm. A small number of metrics have been proposed to measur...