Balancing Coupling in Software Design: Universal Design Principles for Architecting Modular Software Systems

Appendix B

Glossary of Coupling

Coupling is an extremely overloaded term, used in various scenarios and often combined with other terms. While reading the book, you might have wondered why I didn’t mention one or more types of coupling that you have probably encountered in other sources. To address this, this appendix consolidates the most common coupling-related terms, defines their meanings, and explains how they relate to the contents of this book.

afferent coupling A metric in object-oriented design for the number of classes that depend on a given class. In terms of the balanced coupling model, afferent coupling is the number of downstream components that a component shares knowledge with.

balanced coupling Refers to the optimal state of ...