Decomposing object-oriented class modules using an agglomerative clustering technique

Software can be considered a live entity, as it undergoes many alterations throughout its lifecycle. Furthermore, developers do not usually retain a good design in favor of adding new features, comply with requirements or meet deadlines. For these reasons, code can become rather complex and difficult to understand. More particularly in object-oriented systems, classes may become very large and less cohesive. In order to identify such problematic cases, existing approaches have proposed the use of cohesion metrics. However, while metrics can identify classes with low cohesion, they cannot identify new or independent concepts. Moreover, these methods require a lot of human interpretation to identify the respective design flaws. In this paper, we propose a class decomposition method using an agglomerative clustering algorithm based on the Jaccard distance between class members. Our methodology is able to identify new concepts and rank the solutions according to their impact on the design...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICSM
• Authors: Marios Fokaefs, Nikolaos Tsantalis, Alexander Chatzigeorgiou, Jörg Sander
• Keywords: Agglomerative Clustering Algorithm, Class Decomposition Method, Design Quality, ICSM 2009, Software Engineering