关键词: 关键类, h指数, 依赖图, 面向对象, 程序理解

Abstract:

When maintaining an unfamiliar software system, software engineers usually need to consume much time to understand the architecture and function of the system. In order to save their efforts, this paper proposes a light-weight approach to automatically identify key classes from source codes using h-index and its invariants. Software engineers can begin to understand the architecture and function of the system from the key classes identified by the proposed approach. To this end, for a given system, this paper first constructs a dependence graph to represent
the dependence relationships among the classes in the system. Then, it computes h-index and its invariants based on this graph to measure the importance of classes. The experimental results in two open source software systems show that the approach can quickly identify key classes while maintaining the accuracy of identification compared to ex-isting work.

Key words: key class, h-index, dependence graph, object-oriented, program comprehension