coupling

Coupling is the act of joining two things together.  In software development, coupling refers to the degree to which software components are dependant upon each other.  For instance, in a tightly-coupled architecture, each component and its associated components must be present in order for code to be executed or compiled.  In a loosely-coupled architecture, components can remain autonomous and allow middleware software to manage communication between them. In a decoupled architecture, the components can operate completely separately and independently.