隨著開發人員越來越重視軟體品質，為了量測軟體而有許多的軟體度量方法被提出。這些軟體度量方法使用多種特質來量測系統，像是軟體複雜度、軟體耦合力以及內聚力。此外，在量測軟體品質方面，研究指出軟體耦合力是最重要且最具影響力的因子之一，因此有許多關於利用耦合力來量測的研究隨之被提出。在開發軟體系統中，我們常會用到一些物件導向重要的概念，像是結構化設計、動態繫結、多型與繼承，所以單純使用程式碼來度量越來越顯得不足。儘管如此，仍然有許多的研究只針對靜態程式碼的部份加以量測，因為傳統的耦合力是衡量系統內部品質的指標，隨著系統使用了越多的繼承關係，就會造成量測的結果越來越不準確的問題。此外，我們也意識到耦合力有分為多個等級，而每個級別的耦合力都會為系統帶來不同的難易度，然而許多研究都只把耦合力化分為同一個等級。為了解決這個問題，我們依照不同的耦合力等級加以給予權重。
現有的耦合力相關的研究有許多的不足，例如，當我們只透過程式碼來量測軟體，我們是很難得知哪個方法被其他類別呼叫，而為了解決我們目前所提到的問題，我們提出一個名為DWCC的度量方法。由於我們需要從物件導向的系統中獲得資料，所以在我們實驗中使用到了4個JAVA開源軟體系統。實驗結果指出，DWCC對比於其他度量方法與軟體複雜度有更強的關聯性。由此可知，在DWCC中我們所額外考量到的因子對於反映軟體複雜度是很重要的。

As developers pay more and more attention to software quality, there are amounts of software metrics proposed to evaluate the software system. In these metrics, they use various properties to measure the system, such as software complexity, cohesion and coupling. Nevertheless, research has indicated that coupling is one of most significant and fundamental factors for evaluating the quality of software, and numerous research utilizing coupling to measure software systems have been proposed. Some features of object-oriented programming (OOP) (i.e., structural design, dynamic binding, polymorphism, inheritance and interface) are important concepts to develop the software system, and merely utilizing source code to evaluate systems has become more and more insufficient. However, most static metrics focus on measuring the source code in the program [1][2][3]; this situation would cause problems of inaccuracy because traditional coupling that represents the indicator to measure the inner quality attribute of programs [4] loses accuracy as there is more use of the inheritance. Nevertheless, we noticed that there are various coupling levels, and each level corresponds to the difficulty of systems, while most studies treat these coupling levels as equal. To solve this problem, we weighted each level individually, and the weighted values are the value of each coupling level.
There are some insufficiencies of existing coupling metrics. For instance, it is difficult to know which code was executed and which method is called by another class, while we measure the system merely using source code. In order to solve the problem we mentioned before, we proposed a Dynamic Weighted Class Coupling (DWCC) metric to solve these problems. Since we need to obtain the data from object-oriented (OO) software, the evaluation of the experiment has been conducted by four java open-source software systems. Our experimental result shows that the DWCC metric we proposed has a stronger correlation with the difficulty of programs. Therefore, the factors we considered in the DWCC metric are significant to reflect the actual difficulty.

Chapter 1 Introduction 10
Chapter 2 Literature Review 17
2.1 Existing static coupling metrics 21
2.2 Concepts of dynamic metrics 25
2.3 Existing dynamic coupling metrics 31
Chapter 3 Dynamic Weighted Coupling Metric 36
3.1 Add Inheritance Properties 37
3.2 Add Interface Properties 40
3.3 Weighting each factors 43
Chapter 4 Experiments 50
4.1 Validation Strategy 50
4.2 Test Data Sets 52
4.3 Experimental process 53
4.3.1 Dynamic coupling data collection 54
4.3.2 DWCC Tool 57
4.4 Analysis Result 58
4.4.1 Correlation Coefficients 58
4.4.2 p-value 67
4.5 Practical application on DWCC metric 68
4.6 Threats to Validity 73
Chapter 5 Analysis of DWCC properties 76
5.1 Briand’s Properties 76
5.2 Weyuker’s Nine Properties 77
5.3 Proof process 82
5.4 Analytic result 84
Chapter 6 Conclusion and Future Works 86
Reference 88
Appendix 94

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