Using Cluster Analysis to Improve the Design of Component Interfaces

Title

Using Cluster Analysis to Improve the Design of Component Interfaces

 Author

Adnan, R.
Graaf, B.
Van Deursen, A.
Zonneveld, J.

Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

 Department

Software Computer Technology

 Date

2008-12-31

 Abstract

A short (4-page) version of this paper is published in: ASE 2008 - 23rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 15-19 September 2008; doi:10.1109/ASE.2008.54 For large software systems, interface structure has an important impact on their maintainability and build performance. For example, for complex systems written in C, recompilation due to a change in one central header file can run into hours. In this paper, we explore how automated cluster analysis can be used to refactor interfaces, in order to reduce the number of dependencies and to improve encapsulation, thus improving build performance and maintainability. We implemented our approach in a tool called "Interface Regroup Wizard", which we applied to several interfaces of a large industrial embedded system. From this, we not only learned that automated cluster analysis works surprisingly well to improve the design of interfaces, but also which of the refactoring steps are best done manually by an architect.

 To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:bc115344-529f-4b14-89ff-11b461fc6e13

 Publisher

Delft University of Technology, Software Engineering Research Group

 ISSN

1872-5392

 Source

Technical Report Series TUD-SERG-2008-026

 Part of collection

Institutional Repository

 Document type

report

 Rights

(c) 2008 The Author(s)
IEEE
Files
PDF TUD-SERG-2008-026.pdf 252.83 KB
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