Program Restructuring Through Clustering Technique

Program restructuring is a key method to improve the quality of ill-structured programs and therefore to increase the understandability and reduce the maintenance cost. It is a challenging task and much research is still ongoing. This paper presents an approach to program restructuring at the functional level based on the clustering technique with cohesion as the major concern. Clustering has been widely used to group related entities together. The approach focuses on automated support for identifying ill-structured or low cohesive functions and providing heuristic advice in both development and evolution phases. A new similarity measure is defined and intensively studied. The approach is used to restructure real industrial programs. The empirical observations show that the heuristic advice provided by the approach can help software designers make better decision of why and how to restructure a program. Specific source code level software metrics are presented to demonstrate the value of the approach.