Connascence of execution is when the order of execution of multiple components is important. Common examples include locking and unlocking resources, where locks must be acquired and released in the same order everywhere in the entire codebase.

Connascence of execution can also occur when using objects that encapsulate a state machine, and that state machine only allows certain operations in certain states. For example, consider a hypothetical EmailSender class that allows a caller to generate and send an email:

email = Email()
email.setRecipient("foo@example.comp")
email.setSender("me@mydomain.com")
email.send()
email.setSubject("Hello World")

The last two lines show a trivial example of connascence of execution. The setSubject method cannot be called after the send method (at best it will do nothing). In this example the locality of the coupling is very low, but cases where the locality is very high can be much harder to find and fix (consider, for example a scenario where the last two lines are called on separate threads).