On the use of evolutionary coupling for software architecture recovery

Abstract

Software architecture documentation can be partially obtained automatically by means of software architecture recovery tools. These tools mainly cluster software modules to provide a high level structural organization of these modules. They use dependency graphs as input. These graphs reflect various types of coupling among software modules. In this paper, we present an empirical evaluation of using evolutionary coupling as a complementary source of information for software architecture recovery. We use 3 open source projects as subject systems. We derive inter-module dependencies for these systems based on various levels of evolutionary coupling among their modules. We investigate the accuracy of software architecture recovery when input dependency graphs are extended with these additional dependencies. Results show that involving evolutionary coupling in the process can increase the accuracy of architecture recovery by up to 40%.