Exploring Possibilities of Reducing Maintenance Effort in Object Oriented Software by Minimizing Indirect Coupling

Abstract

The quality of a good object oriented software design is much effective when it has highly maintainable class components. This paper describes an investigation into the use of indirect coupling to provide early indications of maintenance effort in object oriented software. The properties of interest are: (i) the potential maintainability of a class and (ii) the likelihood that a class will be affected by maintenance changes made to the overall system. The research explores that minimizing indirect coupling can provide useful indications of software maintenance effort that may have a significant influence on the effort during system maintenance and testing.