Ranking the Importance of Classes via Software Structural Analysis

摘要

How to identify important classes in an object-oriented system is a significant task for resources allocation and decision making. However, the work on ranking the importance of classes is scarce. This paper introduces a weighted software network model to represent the structure of object-oriented software, and based on which an indicator, IC, is defined to measure the importance of classes. By ranking the ICs of all classes we can obtain the important classes we should focus on. Manually inspection of the source code verifies the meaning-fulness of the classes obtained and also validates the feasibility of our approach.