Assessing Modularity using Co-Change Clusters Luciana Lourdes Silva

The traditional modular structure defined by the package hierarchy suffers from the dominant decomposition problem and it is widely accepted that alternative forms of modularization are necessary to increase developer’s productivity. In this paper, we propose an al-ternative form to understand and assess package modularity based on co-change clusters, which are highly inter-related classes con-sidering co-change relations. We evaluate how co-change clusters relate to the package decomposition of three real-world systems. The results show that the projection of co-change clusters to pack-ages follow different patterns in each system. Therefore, we claim that modular views based on co-change clusters can improve devel-opers ’ understanding on how well-modularized are their systems, considering that modularity is the ability to confine changes and evolve components in parallel