Home // International Journal On Advances in Software, volume 3, numbers 1 and 2, 2010 // View article

Automatic Identification of Cohesive Structures within Modularity Reengineering

Authors:
Anja Bog
Oleksandr Panchenko
Kai Spichale
Alexander Zeier

Keywords: Source code organization, Restructuring, reverse engineering, and reengineering, Metrics

Abstract:
The quality of software systems depends heavily on the quality of their structure, which affects maintainability and readability. To improve the quality of structure, a system can be restructured. This paper describes a restructuring process, which uses a combination of strongly connected component analysis, dominance analysis, and intra-modular similarity clustering to identify and preserve structures that have been thoughtfully placed together, but would be separated by pure metric-based or similarity-based techniques. The use of the proposed method allows a significant reduction of the number of components that should be moved. Therefore, the number of false movements is alleviated. The proposed approach was implemented in a prototype and illustrated by statistics and examples from 18 open source Java projects. A coherence metric is introduced to further improve restructuring results.

Pages: 136 to 146

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2010. Used with permission.

Publication date: September 5, 2010

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2628