Using hypergraph clustering for software architecture reconstruction of data-tier software

Software architecture reconstruction techniques aim at recovering software architecture documentation regarding a software system. These techniques mainly analyze coupling/dependencies among the software modules to group them and reason about the high-level structure of the system. Hereby, inter-dependencies among the software modules are mainly represented with design structure matrices or regular directed/undirected graphs. In this paper, we introduce a software architecture reconstruction approach that utilizes hypergraphs for representing inter-module dependencies. We show that these models are more appropriate for capturing dependencies other than direct call relations. We illustrate the application of the approach with an industrial PL/SQL program from the telecommunications domain. PL/SQL programs are mainly composed of procedures that are coupled due to commonly accessed database elements. We analyze and represent these dependencies in the form of a hypergraph. Then, we perform modularity clustering on this model and propose a packaging structure to the designer accordingly. We observed promising results in comparison with previous work. The accuracy of the results were also approved by domain experts. Turkey http://www.turkcell.com.tr Kaya kaya@sabanciuniv.edu Turkey Sabanci University ://people.sabanciuniv.edu/kaya/ metin.altinisik@turkcell.com.tr Turkey Turkcell http://www.turkcell.com.tr Hasan Sozer hasan.sozer@ozyegin.edu.tr Turkey Ozyegin University http://faculty.ozyegin.edu.tr/hsozer