A Hierarchical Clustering-Based Approach for Software Restructuring at the Package Level

Software refactoring at the package level has a major importance in the field of software architecture, since refactoring increases the internal software quality and is beneficial during software maintenance and evolution. As the requirements for grouping application classes into software packages are hard to identify, clustering is useful, since it is able to uncover hidden patterns in data. In this paper we are investigating software refactoring at the package level by using hierarchical clustering. A hierarchical clustering approach is proposed in order to help software developers in designing well-structured software packages. The approach takes an existing software system and remodularizes it at the package level using hierarchical clustering, in order to obtain better-structured packages. The experimental evaluation of the approach is performed on three open source frameworks and the algorithm has proven to perform well.