An Evolutionary Approach to Software Modularity Analysis

Modularity determines software quality in terms of evolvability, changeability, maintainability, etc. and a module could be a vertical slicing through source code directory structure or class boundary. Given a modularized design, we need to determine whether its implementation realizes the designed modularity. Manually comparing source code modular structure with abstracted design modular structure is tedious and error-prone. In this paper, we present an automated approach to check the conformance of source code modularity to the designed modularity. Our approach uses design structure matrices (DSMs) as a uniform representation; it uses existing tools to automatically derive DSMs from the source code and design, and uses a genetic algorithm to automatically cluster DSMs and check the conformance. We applied our approach to a small canonical software system as a proof of concept experiment. The results supported our hypothesis that it is possible to check the conformance between source code structure and design structure automatically, and this approach has the potential to be scaled for use in large software systems.