An intelligent tool for re-engineering software modularity

Schwanke, Robert W.

doi:10.1109/icse.1991.130626

Cited by 168 publications

(105 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Early work towards addressing this issue focussed on architecture recovery: deriving the software's architecture from the source code of the existing system, typically from the source code dependencies of these systems [4][5]. However, even though software architects were often allowed to confirm or refute the suggestions of such analyses, they did not drive the process, thus limiting their ability to impose their desired architecture on the system [6].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Real-Time Reflexion Modelling in architecture reconciliation: A multi case study

Buckley

Alí

English

et al. 2015

Information and Software Technology

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ContextReflexion Modelling is considered one of the more successful approaches to architecture reconciliation. Empirical studies strongly suggest that professional developers involved in real-life industrial projects find the information provided by variants of this approach useful and insightful, but the degree to which it resolves architecture conformance issues is still unclear. ObjectiveThis paper aims to assess the level of architecture conformance achieved by professional architects using Reflexion Modelling, and to determine how the approach could be extended to improve its suitability for this task. MethodAn in-vivo, multi-case-study protocol was adopted across five software systems, from four different financial services organizations. Think-aloud, video-tape and interview data from professional architects involved in Reflexion Modelling sessions were analysed qualitatively. ResultsThis study showed that (at least) four months after the Reflexion Modelling sessions less than 50% of the architectural violations identified were removed. The majority of participants who did remove violations favoured changes to the architectural model rather than to the code. Participants seemed to work off two specific architectural templates, and interactively explored their architectural model to focus in on the causes of violations, and to assess the ramifications of potential code changes. They expressed a desire for dependency analysis beyond static-source-code analysis and scalable visualizations. ConclusionThe findings support several interesting usage-in-practice traits, previously hinted at in the literature. These include 1) the iterative analysis of systems through Reflexion models, as a precursor to possible code change or as a focusing mechanism to identify the location of architecture conformance issues, 2) the extension of the approach with respect to dependency analysis of software systems and architectural modelling templates, 3) improved visualization support and 4) the insight that identification of architectural violations in itself does not lead to their removal in the majority of instances.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Real-Time Reflexion Modelling in architecture reconciliation: A multi case study

Buckley

Alí

English

et al. 2015

Information and Software Technology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…In reverse engineering field, there has been research on measuring similarity of components and restructuring modules in a software system, to improve its maintainability and understandability [36][37][38]. Such similarity measures are based on several metric values such as shared identifier names and function invocation relations.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Similarity of Large Software Systems Based on Source Code Correspondence

Yamamoto

Matsushita

Kobayashi

et al. 2005

Product Focused Software Process Improvement

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Abstract. It is an important and intriguing issue to know the quantitative similarity of large software systems. In this paper, a similarity metric between two sets of source code files based on the correspondence of overall source code lines is proposed. A Software similarity MeAsurement Tool SMAT was developed and applied to various versions of an operating system(BSD UNIX). The resulting similarity valuations clearly revealed the evolutionary history characteristics of the BSD UNIX Operating System.

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“…Clustering obviously depends on the measurement of properties of semiformed modules that, when optimized with respect to those properties, lead (hopefully) to a well-modularized system. For example, in the work on automated software-partitioning by Schwanke [17], modules are quantitatively characterized by the degree to which the functions packaged within the same module contain "shared information." Functions may share information on the basis of, say, the commonality of the names of the data objects used.…”

Section: Previous Work On Software Metrics Relevant To Our Contributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

API-Based and Information-Theoretic Metrics for Measuring the Quality of Software Modularization

Sarkar

RAMA

Kak

2007

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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Abstract-We present in this paper a new set of metrics that measure the quality of modularization of a non-object-oriented software system. We have proposed a set of design principles to capture the notion of modularity and defined metrics centered around these principles. These metrics characterize the software from a variety of perspectives: structural, architectural, and notions such as the similarity of purpose and commonality of goals. (By structural, we are referring to intermodule coupling-based notions, and by architectural, we mean the horizontal layering of modules in large software systems.) We employ the notion of API (Application Programming Interface) as the basis for our structural metrics. The rest of the metrics we present are in support of those that are based on API. Some of the important support metrics include those that characterize each module on the basis of the similarity of purpose of the services offered by the module. These metrics are based on information-theoretic principles. We tested our metrics on some popular open-source systems and some large legacy-code business applications. To validate the metrics, we compared the results obtained on human-modularized versions of the software (as created by the developers of the software) with those obtained on randomized versions of the code. For randomized versions, the assignment of the individual functions to modules was randomized.

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An intelligent tool for re-engineering software modularity

Cited by 168 publications

References 4 publications

Real-Time Reflexion Modelling in architecture reconciliation: A multi case study

Real-Time Reflexion Modelling in architecture reconciliation: A multi case study

Measuring Similarity of Large Software Systems Based on Source Code Correspondence

API-Based and Information-Theoretic Metrics for Measuring the Quality of Software Modularization

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