Programming Languages and Compilers Commons^™

Clustering Classes In Packages For Program Comprehension, Xiaobing Sun, Xiangyue Liu, Bin Li, Bixin Li, David Lo, Lingzhi Liao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

During software maintenance and evolution, one of the important tasks faced by developers is to understand a system quickly and accurately. With the increasing size and complexity of an evolving system, program comprehension becomes an increasingly difficult activity. Given a target system for comprehension, developers may first focus on the package comprehension. The packages in the system are of different sizes. For small-sized packages in the system, developers can easily comprehend them. However, for large-sized packages, they are difficult to understand. In this article, we focus on understanding these large-sized packages and propose a novel program comprehension approach for large-sized …