Difference between Cohesion & Coupling

Difference between Cohesion & Coupling

A first-order principle of software architecture is to increase cohesion and reduce coupling.

Cohesion (interdependency within module) strength/level names : (from worse to better, high cohesion is good)

• Coincidental Cohesion : (Worst) Module elements are unrelated
• Logical Cohesion : Elements perform similar activities as selected from outside module, i.e. by a flag that selects operation to perform (see also CommandObject).
  • i.e. body of function is one huge if-else/switch on operation flag
• Temporal Cohesion : operations related only by general time performed (i.e. initialization() or FatalErrorShutdown?())
• Procedural Cohesion : Elements involved in different but sequential activities, each on different data (usually could be trivially split into multiple modules along linear sequence boundaries)
• Communicational Cohesion : unrelated operations except need same data or input
• Sequential Cohesion : operations on same data in significant order; output from one function is input to next (pipeline)
• Informational Cohesion: a module performs a number of actions, each with its own entry point, with independent code for each action, all performed on the same data structure. Essentially an implementation of an abstract data type.
  • i.e. define structure of sales_region_table and its operators: init_table(), update_table(), print_table()
• Functional Cohesion : all elements contribute to a single, well-defined task, i.e. a function that performs exactly one operation
  • get_engine_temperature(), add_sales_tax()

Coupling (interdependence between modules) level names: (from worse to better, high coupling is bad)

• Content/Pathological Coupling : (worst) When a module uses/alters data in another
• Control Coupling : 2 modules communicating with a control flag (first tells second what to do via flag)
• Common/Global-data Coupling : 2 modules communicating via global data
• Stamp/Data-structure Coupling : Communicating via a data structure passed as a parameter. The data structure holds more information than the recipient needs.
• Data Coupling : (best) Communicating via parameter passing. The parameters passed are only those that the recipient needs.
• No data coupling : independent modules.