Assess and Control Component Coupling in Software Systems

Over time software systems tend to develop several negative symptoms: simple changes require a surprisingly big effort to be implemented, changes cause the system to break in unrelated areas, reuse of code in other systems is simply not  feasible, the code is hard to read and understand even for the directly involved programmers. One of the main reasons of facing these symptoms is an unintended increase of the overall system coupling.

Except for very small systems the manual control of the overall coupling is a tedious task – a tool-based approach is needed. Sonargraph-Explorer is such a tool and among other things it helps the developer to assess and control coupling and work against its accidental increase. It is the first product built upon the new Sonargraph Next Generation platform supporting Java, C# and C/C++. It offers different visualizations of dependency structures and a powerful scripting engine based on Groovy which allows extending the built-in analysis capabilities.

The following content introduces the needed definitions and terms related to component coupling (one way to express the overall system coupling). It explains how to use Sonargraph Explorer to visualize the corresponding dependencies and determine components contributing significantly to the overall system coupling with a custom script automatically. Read More