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Case study on which relations to use for clustering-based software architecture recovery

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Abstract

Clustering-based software architecture recovery is an area that has received significant attention in the software engineering community over the years. Its key concept is the compilation and clustering of a system-wide graph that consists of source code entities as nodes, and source code relations as edges. However, the related research has mostly focused on investigating different clustering methods and techniques, and consequently there is limited work on addressing the question of what is a minimal set of relations that can be easily extracted from the system’s source code, and yet can be accurately used for extracting its architecture. In this paper, we report on results obtained from an architecture recovery case study we have conducted, by considering all possible combinations which can be generated from thirteen commonly used source code relations. We have examined the similarity of the extracted architectures obtained by using each different relation combination for different systems, against the corresponding architecture which is obtained by applying all thirteen relations and whch we consider as the ground truth architecture. For this purpose, we have also examined whether the use of all these thirteen relations is indeed adequate to yield a ground truth architecture, by applying this architecture extraction process on five large sofware systems for which their ground truth architecture has been independently established. The overall results of our study indicate that there is small set of relations for procedural systems, and another similar set for object oriented systems, that can be easily extracted from the source code and yet used to yield an architecture that is close to the ground truth architecture.

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Notes

  1. A list of software architecture definitions can be found on http://www.sei.cmu.edu/architecture/start/glossary/classicdefs.cfm

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Stergios Ientsek for his contribution related to enhancements of the extraction tools and the production of RSF files, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, 15780, Greece

    Ioanna Stavropoulou & Marios Grigoriou

  2. Department of Computer Science, Western University, London, ON N6A 5B7, Canada

    Kostas Kontogiannis

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  1. Ioanna Stavropoulou
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  2. Marios Grigoriou
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  3. Kostas Kontogiannis
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Correspondence to Kostas Kontogiannis.

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Communicated by: Paolo Tonella

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Stavropoulou, I., Grigoriou, M. & Kontogiannis, K. Case study on which relations to use for clustering-based software architecture recovery. Empir Software Eng 22, 1717–1762 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-016-9459-z

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