A Network Perspective on Software Modularity
This work addresses software engineers by offering a new way to measure modularity, but it is incremental as it applies existing network methods to software data.
The authors tackled the problem of quantifying software modularity by applying complex network science to dependency networks of Java projects, finding that their method provides a promising quantitative approach for software engineering.
Modularity is a desirable characteristic for software systems. In this article we propose to use a quantitative method from complex network sciences to estimate the coherence between the modularity of the dependency network of large open source Java projects and their decomposition in terms of Java packages. The results presented in this article indicate that our methodology offers a promising and reasonable quantitative approach with potential impact on software engineering processes.