Do Software Categories Impact Coupling Metrics?

Software metrics is a valuable mechanism to assess
the quality of software systems. Metrics can help the automated
analysis of the growing data available in software repositories.
Coupling metrics is a kind of software metrics that have been
extensively used since the seventies to evaluate several software
properties related to maintenance, evolution and reuse tasks. For
example, several works have shown that we can use coupling
metrics to assess the reusability of software artifacts available in
repositories. However, thresholds for software metrics to indicate
adequate coupling levels are still a matter of discussion. In this
paper, we investigate the impact of software categories on the
coupling level of software systems. We have found that different
categories may have different levels of coupling, suggesting that
we need special attention when comparing software systems in
different categories and when using predefined thresholds
already available in the literature.