Abstract
Many design guidelines state that a software system architecture should avoid cycles between its packages. Yet such cycles appear again and again in many programs. We believe that the existing approaches for cycle detection are too coarse to assist the developers to remove cycles from their programs. In this paper, we describe an efficient algorithm that performs a fine-grained analysis of the cycles among the packages of an application. In addition, we define a metric to rank cycles by their level of undesirability, prioritizing the cycles that seems the more undesired by the developers. Our approach is validated on two large and mature software systems in Java and Smalltalk.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Hautus, E.: Improving java software through package structure analysis. In: IASTED International Conference Software Engineering and Applications (2002)
Laval, J., Denier, S., Ducasse, S., Bergel, A.: Identifying cycle causes with enriched dependency structural matrix. In: WCRE 2009: Proceedings of the 2009 16th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering. Lille, France (2009)
Martin, R.C.: Agile Software Development. Principles, Patterns, and Practices. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs (2002)
Melton, H., Tempero, E.: An empirical study of cycles among classes in java. Empirical Software Engineering 12(4), 389–415 (2007)
Melton, H., Tempero, E.D.: Jooj: Real-time support for avoiding cyclic dependencies. In: 14th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, pp. 87–95. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2007)
Parnas, D.L.: Designing software for ease of extension and contraction. In: International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 1978), pp. 264–277 (1978)
Sangal, N., Jordan, E., Sinha, V., Jackson, D.: Using dependency models to manage complex software architecture. In: Proceedings of OOPSLA 2005. pp. 167–176 (2005)
Steven, D., Eppinger, D.A.G.: Methods for analyzing design procedures. In: ASME Conference on Design Theory and Methodology. pp. 227–233, miami (1991)
Tarjan, R.E.: Depth-first search and linear graph algorithms. SIAM J. Comput. 1(2), 146–160 (1972)
Tarjan, R.E.: Enumeration of the elementary circuits of a directed graph. SIAM J. Comput. 2(3), 211–216 (1973)
Vainsencher, D.: Mudpie: layers in the ball of mud. Computer Languages, Systems & Structures 30(1-2), 5–19 (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Falleri, JR., Denier, S., Laval, J., Vismara, P., Ducasse, S. (2011). Efficient Retrieval and Ranking of Undesired Package Cycles in Large Software Systems. In: Bishop, J., Vallecillo, A. (eds) Objects, Models, Components, Patterns. TOOLS 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6705. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21952-8_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21952-8_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-21951-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21952-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)