Community structure of complex software systems: Analysis and applications

Lovro Šubelj and Marko Bajec

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2011, vol. 390, issue 16, 2968-2975

Abstract: Due to notable discoveries in the fast evolving field of complex networks, recent research in software engineering has also focused on representing software systems with networks. Previous work has observed that these networks follow scale-free degree distributions and reveal small-world phenomena, while we here explore another property commonly found in different complex networks, i.e. community structure. We adopt class dependency networks, where nodes represent software classes and edges represent dependencies among them, and show that these networks reveal a significant community structure, characterized by similar properties as observed in other complex networks. However, although intuitive and anticipated by different phenomena, identified communities do not exactly correspond to software packages. We empirically confirm our observations on several networks constructed from Java and various third party libraries, and propose different applications of community detection to software engineering.

Keywords: Community structure; Complex networks; Software systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037843711100269X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:390:y:2011:i:16:p:2968-2975

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2011.03.036

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().