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

Abstract

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 focus on PL/SQL programs that are developed as data access tiers of business software. These programs are mainly composed of procedures that are coupled due to commonly accessed database elements. Hypergraphs are more appropriate for capturing this type of coupling, where an element can relate to more than one procedure. We illustrate the application of the approach with an industrial PL/SQL program from the telecommunications domain. We analyze and represent dependencies among the modules of this program 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.