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Co-change Clusters: Extraction and Application on Assessing Software Modularity

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Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development XII

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((TAOSD,volume 8989))

Abstract

The traditional modular structure defined by the package hierarchy suffers from the dominant decomposition problem and it is widely accepted that alternative forms of modularization are necessary to increase developer’s productivity. In this paper, we propose an alternative form to understand and assess package modularity based on co-change clusters, which are highly inter-related classes considering co-change relations. We evaluate how co-change clusters relate to the package decomposition of four real-world systems. The results show that the projection of co-change clusters to packages follows different patterns in each system. Therefore, we claim that modular views based on co-change clusters can improve developers’ understanding on how well-modularized are their systems, considering that modularity is the ability to confine changes and evolve components in parallel.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://glaros.dtc.umn.edu/gkhome/views/cluto.

  2. 2.

    Geronimo is an application server, http://geronimo.apache.org.

  3. 3.

    An information retrieval library, http://lucene.apache.org.

  4. 4.

    To execute Chameleon, we relied on the CLUTO clustering package, http://glaros.dtc.umn.edu/gkhome/cluto/cluto/overview.

  5. 5.

    To extract and visualize distribution maps, we used the Topic Viewer tool [42], available at https://code.google.com/p/topic-viewer).

  6. 6.

    These clusters are called octopus, because they have a body centered on a single package and tentacles in other packages [14].

  7. 7.

    http://gephi.github.io/.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by FAPEMIG, CAPES, and CNPq.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

    Luciana Lourdes Silva & Marco Tulio Valente

  2. Faculty of Computing, Federal University of Uberlândia, Uberlândia, Brazil

    Marcelo de A. Maia

  3. Federal Institute of the Triângulo Mineiro, Uberaba, Brazil

    Luciana Lourdes Silva

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  1. Luciana Lourdes Silva
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  2. Marco Tulio Valente
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Correspondence to Luciana Lourdes Silva .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Shigeru Chiba

  2. University of Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Éric Tanter

  3. Google Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark

    Erik Ernst

  4. Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, Germany

    Robert Hirschfeld

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Silva, L.L., Valente, M.T., de A. Maia, M. (2015). Co-change Clusters: Extraction and Application on Assessing Software Modularity. In: Chiba, S., Tanter, É., Ernst, E., Hirschfeld, R. (eds) Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development XII. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8989. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46734-3_3

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