A Logical Coupling Measurement Method Based on Transaction Time, Size and Expertise of Developer

The priority of software maintenance researches has been increasing, since the lengths of software lifecycle are more increasing. Measuring couplings among software entities provides a good quantitative source for analyzing source code and point out candidate refactoring positions. Logical-coupling measures how strongly two software entities are related with each other from the evolutionary point of view. The researches on logical-coupling have been focusing on improving the correctness and explaining more aspects that are hiding by measuring logical-coupling among finer-grained entities. However, existing researches on logical-coupling fails to consider characteristics of developers and projects reflected in transactions. The research proposes a logical-coupling measurement method based on transaction time, size and expertise of developer to improve the correctness by considering characteristics of developers and projects reflected in transactions. The method has been validated by applying it to three open-source projects.