Characterizing large object-oriented software: a topological perspective
Qing Xie · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2010
The increase of the software complexity makes how to understand software systems a hard work. Since you cannot control what you cannot measure, many research works have been done on software metrics. But one key property has always been neglect, i.e., the topological properties of software systems. In this paper, we proposed to analyze object-oriented (OO) software systems from the perspective of software topological property. First, OO software systems are represented by network at method and class level, respectively. Then we introduce complex network theory to analyze the topological properties of these networks. A case study on an open source OO software system, JHotDraw 5.1, gives an illustration of our approach. Our approach can give further understanding of OO software systems.