An investigation of coupling, reuse and maintenance in a commercial C++ application

This paper describes an investigation into the use of coupling complexity metrics to obtain early indications of various properties of a system of C++ classes. The properties of interest are: (i) the potential reusability of a class and (ii) the likelihood that a class will be affected by maintenance changes made to the overall system. The study indicates that coupling metrics can provide useful indications of both reusable classes and of classes that may have a significant influence on the effort expended during system maintenance and testing.