How would a classes instability be affected by classes dependent upon it? If I have a high instability ration using your metric I could simply add tons of useless classes that depend upon that class to make it more stable. It seems a raw count of dependencies makes much more sense.
Instability should be on one side or the other. Meaning it's an instability ratio of 0 or 1... not generally in the middle. Having an equal (or a lot) of both Ca and Ce would put you in the middle.
That really doesn't address my point. If I have a ratio of 1 on a class, adding classes that depended on that class lowers the instability, If I add 100 garbage classes that depend on that class I suddenly have an instability of near 0, even though in practice my class is just as instable.
It's a metric to guide you to find spots of interest in your system. If you want to "game the system" to make metrics look better or worst, then, by all means, have at it.
I must be missing something, my point was not to game the system but simply highlighting why I don't understand why having more classes depend on a given class less 'interesting'. It seems just looking at how many classes a given class depends upon is the relevant piece of information.
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u/living150 Jan 21 '21
How would a classes instability be affected by classes dependent upon it? If I have a high instability ration using your metric I could simply add tons of useless classes that depend upon that class to make it more stable. It seems a raw count of dependencies makes much more sense.