Print Email Facebook Twitter Automatic Identification of Key Classes in a Software System Using Webmining Techniques Title Automatic Identification of Key Classes in a Software System Using Webmining Techniques Author Zaidman, A.E. Demeyer, S. Faculty Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science Department Software Computer Technology Date 2008-12-31 Abstract Preprint of article published in: Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice (Wiley), 20 (6), 2008; doi:10.1002/smr.370 Software engineers new to a project are often stuck sorting through hundreds of classes in order to find those few classes that offer a significant insight into the inner workings of the software project. To help stimulate this process, we propose a technique that can identify the most important classes in a system or the key classes of that system. Software engineers can use these classes to focus their understanding efforts when starting to work on a new software project. Those key classes are typically characterized with having a lot of ‘control’ within the application. In order to find these controlling classes, we present a detection approach that is based on dynamic coupling and webmining. We demonstrate the potential of our technique using two open-source software systems that have a rich documentation set. During the case studies we use dynamically gathered coupling information that vary between a number of coupling metrics. The case studies show that we are able to retrieve 90% of the classes deemed important by the original maintainers of the systems, while maintaining a level of precision of around 50%. Subject program comprehensiondynamic analysiswebminingcoupling To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:d5c11f88-654e-45e2-b0f3-fa00570c51f7 Publisher Delft University of Technology, Software Engineering Research Group ISSN 1872-5392 Source Technical Report Series TUD-SERG-2008-031 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type report Rights (c) 2008 The Author(s)Wiley Files PDF TUD-SERG-2008-031.pdf 460.17 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:d5c11f88-654e-45e2-b0f3-fa00570c51f7/datastream/OBJ/view