Abstract
We present a multi-level formation model for complex software systems. The previous works extract the software systems to software networks for further studies, but usually investigate the software networks at the class level. In contrast to these works, our treatment of software systems as multi-level networks is more realistic. In particular, the software networks are organized by three levels of granularity, which represents the modularity and hierarchy in the formation process of real-world software systems. More importantly, simulations based on this model have generated more realistic structural properties of software networks, such as power-law, clustering and modularization. On the basis of this model, how the structure of software systems effects software design principles is then explored, and it could be helpful for understanding software evolution and software engineering practices.
Highlights
Many systems in nature and society reveal network organizations
The main contribution of this paper is that a multi-level model for software network evolution is proposed
Through the comparisons with the real software networks from different aspects, the model has been proven to be inherently close to describing the formation process of real software systems
Summary
Many systems in nature and society reveal network organizations. These networks, such as biological protein networks [1], science collaborations [2,3], social networks [4] and the Internet [5], have been found to represent some attributes, such as scale free, small world, etc. For the software systems with a more complex structure, the corresponding software networks are organized to be highly functional, modularized [19] and evolvable [15] This brings some further studies on software networks, such as community detection [20,21], quality assessment [10], important unit identification [22], bug classification [23] and developer social collaboration [24,25], which are helpful to various phases in software engineering practices. In view of the current situation discussed above, we aim at more accurately understanding the general mechanism that governs the evolution of software systems and exploring the cause-effect relationship between a variety of software development principles and the structure of software systems To accomplish this goal, we have developed a multi-level model of software evolution, which represents software systems as directed networks and adopts a modular binding process for new component attachments.
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