Efferent Coupling is a metric in software development. In Computer science, coupling or dependency is the degree to which each program module relies on each one of the other modules A software metric is a measure of some property of a piece of Software or its specifications Software development is the translation of a user need or marketing goal into a Software product It measures the number of types a class knows about.
This includes inheritance, interface implementation, parameter types, variable types, and exceptions.
A large efferent coupling can indicate that a class is unfocused. It may also indicate brittleness, since it depends on the stability of all the types to which it is coupled.