Mining source code elements for comprehending object-oriented systems and evaluating their maintainability

  • Authors:
  • Yiannis Kanellopoulos;Thimios Dimopulos;Christos Tjortjis;Christos Makris

  • Affiliations:
  • The University of Manchester, U.K.;Deutsche Telekom Labs, Berlin, Germany;The University of Manchester, U.K.;University of Patras

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Data mining and its capacity to deal with large volumes of data and to uncover hidden patterns has been proposed as a means to support industrial scale software maintenance and comprehension. This paper presents a methodology for knowledge acquisition from source code in order to comprehend an object-oriented system and evaluate its maintainability. We employ clustering in order to support semi-automated software maintenance and comprehension.A model and an associated process are provided, in order to extract elements from source code; K-Means clustering is then applied on these data, in order to produce system overviews and deductions. The methodology is evaluated on JBoss, a very large Open Source Application Server; results are discussed and conclusions are presented together with directions for future work.