Restructuring of Object-Oriented Software System Using Clustering Techniques

Abstract

Producing a well-designed software system is always required, as a result of that largely maintenance cost of software is reduced and reusability of the software is improved. On the other hand, the internal structure of software system is deteriorating because of prolonged maintenance activities. In these circumstances, one technique to get the better overall internal structure of the system without changing its external behavior is restructuring. One technique to carry out restructuring is to use refactoring on the existing source code. Code refactoring is a strong approach in software development in turn to enhance the internal structure of the software without changing its external behavior. The purpose of refactoring is to increase the cohesion of existing code and reducing coupling in the existing code of software system. Different methods have been proposed to increase the cohesion of the system. Clustering is one of the techniques used for improving the cohesion of the system. Clustering, a data mining technique, is used for grouping things based on the characteristics, so that it can be used to overhaul the class structure of the software system. Clustering algorithms are used to find the refactoring opportunity. In this paper, we propose a new method for software restructuring using clustering with multiple refactoring methods. The proposed method utilizes multiple refactoring methods to increase the cohesion of the part with no change in the meaning of software system. The benefit of the proposed method is likely to increase the effectiveness of the software system by improving its cohesion.