AXIOMATIC DESIGN IN SOFTWARE DESIGN FOR SIX SIGMA (DFSS) - Software Design for Six-Sigma: A Roadmap for Excellence - page 349

requirements. To have good software, the relationship between the independent mod-
ules must be designed to make them work effectively and explicitly. The axiomatic
design framework supplies a method to overcome these difficulties systematically
and ensures that the modules are in the right place in the right order when the mod-
ules are established as the row of design matrix. The axiomatic design methodology
for software development can help software engineers and programmers to develop
effective and reliable software systems quickly.

13.4 COUPLING MEASURES

Coupling is a measure of how interconnected modules are. Two modules are coupled
if a change to a DP in one module may require changes in the other module. The
lowest coupling is desirable.
In hardware, coupling is defined on a continuous scale. Rinderle (1982) and Suh
and Rinderle (1982) proposed the use of reangularity “ R ” and semangularity “ S ”as
coupling measures. Both R and S are defined in (13.13) and (13.14), respectively.
R is a measure of the orthogonality between the DPs in terms of the absolute value
of the product of the geometric sines of all the angles between the different DP
pair combinations of the design matrix. As the degree of coupling increases, “ R ”
decreases. Semangularity, S , however, is an angular measure of parallelism of the pair

TABLE 13.3 ( Continued )

Object
211/
212/
213 Object 1 Object 2 Object 22 Object 23 Object 1 *

Element d Window d Radio B Mouse Canvas Element *

DP11 Line1 DP211 Radiobutton line

DP12 Rectangle r DP212 Radiobutton rectangle

DP13 Circle c DP213 Radiobutton circle

DP22 Mouse m

DP23 Canvas c

A Element B Window() a Element * ()

F CreateButtons() getStart()

O addLine() getEnd()

P addRectangle getULCorner()

Q addCircle() getLRCorner()

G implement

MouseLisner

getCenter()

R mousePressed() getRadius()

S mouseReleased() assignLine()

H draw() assignRectangle()

b/c isLineSelected() assignCircle()

b/c inRectangleSelected()

b/c inCircleSelected()