What is the meaning of 'high cohesion'?

Posted by Max on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Max
Published on 2012-08-31T02:43:59Z Indexed on 2012/08/31 3:49 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 288

Filed under:

programming-practices

I am a student who recently joined a software development company as an intern. Back at the university, one of my professors used to say that we have to strive to achieve "Low coupling and high cohesion".

I understand the meaning of low coupling. It means to keep the code of separate components separately, so that a change in one place does not break the code in another.

But what is meant by high cohesion. If it means integrating the various pieces of the same component well with each other, I dont understand how that becomes advantageous.

What is meant by high cohesion? Can an example be explained to understand its benefits?

Related posts about programming-practices

programming practices starting

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
I have taken my major as computer science and Engineering and I am really confused at this moment. My first course was about learning C and C++ and I learned the basics of those. Now I am really confused what to do next. Some says I should practice algorithms and do contests in ACM-ICPC for now… >>> More
Are `break` and `continue` bad programming practices?

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
My boss keeps mentioning nonchalantly that bad programmers use break and continue in loops. I use them all the time because they make sense; let me show you the inspiration: function verify(object) { if (object->value < 0) return false; if (object->value > object->max_value)… >>> More
Why is C++ backward compatibility important / necessary?

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
As far as understand it is a well-established opinion within the C++ community that C is an obsolete language that was useful 20 years ago but cannot support many modern good programming practices, or even encourages bad practices; certain features that were typical of C++ (C with classes) during… >>> More
Any task-control algorithms programming practices?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi, I was just wondering if there's any field which concerns the task-control programming (or at least that's the way I call it). For a better explanation of task-control consider the following scenario: An application (master-thread) waits for a command - which might be a particular action or… >>> More
displaying python's autodoc to the user (python 3.3)

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
I'm writing a simple command line math game, and I'm using python's autodoc for my math algorithms to help me remember, for example, what a proth number is while i'm writing the algorithm, but later on I'll want to tell that information to the user as well, so they'll know what the answer was. So… >>> More

Developer IT