Modeling the growth of complex software function dependency networks

James Ma, Daniel Zeng () and Huimin Zhao
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James Ma: The University of Arizona
Daniel Zeng: The University of Arizona
Huimin Zhao: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Information Systems Frontiers, 2012, vol. 14, issue 2, No 12, 315 pages

Abstract: Abstract Software engineering efforts can potentially benefit much from a good understanding of the structures of existing software systems and the processes governing their development. Towards that end, we study software systems by means of the complex network analysis framework. We model a software package as a network, with nodes representing the functions in the package and edges representing the dependencies among the functions. Our empirical analysis of five widely-adopted open-source software packages reveals a set of interesting features of such networks, which cannot be adequately reproduced by existing complex network models. We then set out to develop a new network growth model, explicitly imitating generally-advocated software development principals, such as divide-and-conquer, modularization, high intra-module cohesion, and low inter-module coupling. Results of our analytical derivations and numeric studies show that our model can more closely reproduce the particular features exhibited by real-world software packages, thus hopefully better explaining the phenomena of concern.

Keywords: Software systems; Complex networks; Network growth model; Cohesion and coupling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10796-010-9239-z

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