Verifying design modularity, hierarchy, and interaction locality using data clustering techniques

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Verifying design modularity, hierarchy, and interaction locality using data clustering techniques

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ACM Southeast Regional Conference archive
Proceedings of the 45th annual southeast regional conference table of contents

Winston-Salem, North Carolina

SESSION: Papers table of contents

Pages: 419 - 424

Year of Publication: 2007

ISBN:978-1-59593-629-5

Authors

Liguo Yu	Indiana University, South Bend, South Bend, IN
Srini Ramaswamy	University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, AR

Sponsor

SIGAPP: ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

Bibliometrics

Downloads (6 Weeks): 8, Downloads (12 Months): 38, Citation Count: 2

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ABSTRACT

Modularity, hierarchy, and interaction locality are general approaches to reducing the complexity of any large system. A widely used principle in achieving these goals in designing software systems is striving for high cohesion within a module and low coupling between modules. However, this principle has difficulties in practice. Because a hierarchical system structure often consists of several layers, it is difficult to decide at what layer an interaction should be considered as cohesion, and at what layer an interaction should be considered as coupling. In this paper, we do not differentiate cohesion and coupling, but use a general term interaction to represent the dependencies between software modules. We propose a method to verify the design modularity, hierarchy, and interaction locality of a software system. This approach is based on the component interactions gathered from certain design level artifacts, such as UML diagrams. Data clustering technique is then used to group software components according to the degree of interactions between them. To show how to use this approach, we apply it to Parna's KWIC object-oriented design example, in which sequence diagram is used to derive the degree of component interactions.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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CITED BY 2

	Liguo Yu , Kai Chen , Srini Ramaswamy, Multiple-parameter coupling metrics for layered component-based software, Software Quality Control, v.17 n.1, p.5-24, March 2009
	Liguo Yu , Srini Ramaswamy, An empirical approach to evaluating dependency locality in hierarchically structured software systems, Journal of Systems and Software, v.82 n.3, p.463-472, March, 2009