Open Source Software: How Can Design Metrics Facilitate Architecture Recovery?

Abstract

Modern software development methodologies include reuse of open source code. Reuse can be facilitated by architectural knowledge of the software, not necessarily provided in the documentation of open source software. The effort required to comprehend the system's source code and discover its architecture can be considered a major drawback in reuse. In a recent study we examined the correlations between design metrics and classes' architecture layer. In this paper, we apply our methodology in more open source projects to verify the applicability of our method. Keywords: system understanding; program comprehension; object-oriented; reuse; architecture layer; design metrics;