Software entities as bird flocks and fish schools

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel approach based on the distributed behavioral model proposed by Reynolds to simulate animal motion such as bird flocks and fish schools. Our proposal has been used to group similar source code classes and has been implemented in a prototype of a supporting system. The approach and the software prototype have been preliminarily assessed on six open source object-oriented software systems implemented in Java. The results indicate that our proposal is promising in source code comprehension and could be successfully applied in the architecture recovery field.