Software Module Clustering as a Multi-Objective Search Problem

Software module clustering is the problem of automatically organising software units into modules to improve program structure. There has been a great deal of recent interest in search based formulations of this problem, in which module boundaries are identified by automated search, guided by a fitness function that captures the twin objectives of high cohesion and low coupling in a single objective fitness function. This paper introduces two novel multi-objective formulations of the software module clustering problem, in which several different objectives (including cohesion and coupling) are represented separately. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the multi-objective approach, a set of experiments were performed on 17 real-world module clustering problems. The results of this empirical study provide strong evidence to support the claim that the multi-objective approach produces significantly better solutions than the existing single objective approach.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: TSE
• Authors: Kata Praditwong, Mark Harman, Xin Yao
• Keywords: Multi-objective Approach, Software Module, TSE 2011, fitness Function