Abstract
Changes during software evolution and poor design decisions often lead to packages that are hard to understand and maintain, because they usually group together classes with unrelated responsibilities. One way to improve such packages is to decompose them into smaller, more cohesive packages. The difficulty lies in the fact that most definitions and interpretations of cohesion are rather vague and the multitude of measures proposed by researchers usually capture only one aspect of cohesion. We propose a new technique for automatic re-modularization of packages, which uses structural and semantic measures to decompose a package into smaller, more cohesive ones. The paper presents the new approach as well as an empirical study, which evaluates the decompositions proposed by the new technique. The results of the evaluation indicate that the decomposed packages have better cohesion without a deterioration of coupling and the re-modularizations proposed by the tool are also meaningful from a functional point of view.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all the students who participated to our study. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and useful comments. Andrian Marcus was supported in part by grants from the US National Foundation: CCF-1017263 and CCF-0845706.
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Editors: Giuliano Antoniol and Martin Pinzger
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Bavota, G., De Lucia, A., Marcus, A. et al. Using structural and semantic measures to improve software modularization. Empir Software Eng 18, 901–932 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-012-9226-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-012-9226-8