Toward Measuring Software Coupling via Weighted Dynamic Metrics

Coupling metrics are an established way to measure internal software quality with respect to modularity. Dynamic metrics have been used to improve the accuracy of static metrics for object-oriented software. We introduce a dynamic metric NOI that takes into account the number of interactions (method calls) during the run of a system. We used the data collected from an experiment to compute our NOI metric and compared the results to a static coupling analysis. We observed an unexpected level of correlation and significant differences between class-and package-level analyses.