On the Nature of Cohesion

I've published a new paper: On the Nature of Cohesion: Cohesion as a Two-Axis Schema.

Cohesion is one of the oldest concepts in software design — introduced by Stevens, Myers, and Constantine in 1974, taught in every curriculum, invoked in every code review. For fifty years, the field has struggled to define it formally. Every published definition is a characterization, not an operational criterion. Every published metric measures a structural proxy.

The paper surveys the major cohesion metrics from the literature, formalizes what cohesion is under any admissible modularization principle, develops the necessary conditions a principled cohesion metric must satisfy, and diagnoses why existing approaches fall short.

If you teach cohesion, apply it in code reviews, or work on software metrics — this paper directly concerns the concept you're using.

Yannick Loth. On the Nature of Cohesion: Cohesion as a Two-Axis Schema. June 2026.

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20492913 — free on Zenodo.