Refactoring Software Packages via Community Detection in Complex Software Networks

Abstract

An intrinsic property of software in a real-world environment is its need to evolve, which is usually accompanied by the increase of software complexity and deterioration of software quality, making software maintenance a tough problem. Refactoring is regarded as an effective way to address this problem. Many refactoring approaches at the method and class level have been proposed. But the research on software refactoring at the package level is very little. This paper presents a novel approach to refactor the package structures of object oriented software. It uses software networks to represent classes and their dependencies. It proposes a constrained community detection algorithm to obtain the optimized community structures in software networks, which also correspond to the optimized package structures. And it finally provides a list of classes as refactoring candidates by comparing the optimized package structures with the real package structures. The empirical evaluation of the proposed approach has been performed in two open source Java projects, and the benefits of our approach are illustrated in comparison with the other three approaches.