MoJo: A Distance Metric for Software Clusterings

The software clustering problem has attracted much attention recently, since it is an integral part of the process of reverse engineering large software systems. A key problem in this research is the difficulty in comparing different approaches in an objective fashion. In this paper, we present a metric that can be used in evaluating the similarity of two different decompositions of a software system. Our metric calculates a distance between two partitions of the same set of software resources. We begin by introducing the model we use. Consequently, we present a heuristic algorithmthat calculates the distance inan efficient fashion. Finally, we discuss some experiments that showcase the performance of the algorithm and the effectiveness of the metric.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: WCRE
• Authors: Vassilios Tzerpos, Richard C. Holt
• Keywords: Engineering Large Software, Software Clustering Problem, Software Engineering, Software System, WCRE 1999