Towards Automatically Improving Package Structure While Respecting Original Design Decisions

Abstract—Recently, there has been an important progress in applying search-based optimization techniques to the problem of software re-modularization. Yet, a major part of the existing body of work addresses the problem of modularizing software systems from scratch, regardless of the existing packages structure. This paper presents a novel multi-objective optimization approach for improving existing packages structure. The optimization ap-proach aims at increasing the cohesion and reducing the coupling and cyclic connectivity of packages, by modifying as less as pos-sible the existing packages organization. Moreover, maintainers can specify several constraints to guide the optimization process with regard to extra design factors. To this contribution, we use the Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II). We evaluate the optimization approach through an experiment covering four real-world software systems. The results promise the effectiveness of our optimization approach for improving existing packages structure by doing very small modifications. Index Terms—Software Modularization; Cohesion and Cou-pling Principles; Multi-Objective Optimizatio