On the Conceptual Cohesion of Co-Change Clusters

The analysis of co-change clusters as an alternative software decomposition can provide insights on different perspectives of modularity. But the usual approach using coarse-grained entities does not provide relevant information, like the conceptual cohesion of the modular abstractions that emerge f...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2015 29th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering pp. 120 - 129
Main Authors De Oliveira, Marcos Cesar, Bonifacio De Almeida, Rodrigo, Ramos, Guilherme N., Ribeiro, Marcio
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.09.2015
Subjects
Buildings
Electronic mail
History
Indexes
Java
Measurement
Software
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Summary:The analysis of co-change clusters as an alternative software decomposition can provide insights on different perspectives of modularity. But the usual approach using coarse-grained entities does not provide relevant information, like the conceptual cohesion of the modular abstractions that emerge from co-change clusters. This work presents a novel approach to analyze the conceptual cohesion of the source-code associated with co-change clusters of fine-grained entities. We obtain from the change history information found in version control systems. We describe the use of our approach to analyze six well established and currently active open-source projects from different domains and one of the most relevant systems of the Brazilian Government for the financial domain. The results show that co-change clusters offer a new perspective on the code based on groups with high conceptual cohesion between its entities (up to 69% more than the original package decomposition), and, thus, are suited to detect concepts pervaded on codebases, opening new possibilities of comprehension of source-code by means of the concepts embodied in the co-change clusters.
DOI:10.1109/SBES.2015.16