Cycles Assessment with CycleTable

Laval, Jannik; Denier, Simon; Ducasse, Stephane

Document type :

Rapport de recherche

Title :

Cycles Assessment with CycleTable

Author(s) :

Laval, Jannik [Auteur]
Analyses and Languages Constructs for Object-Oriented Application Evolution [RMOD]
Denier, Simon [Auteur]
Analyses and Languages Constructs for Object-Oriented Application Evolution [RMOD]
Ducasse, Stephane [Auteur]

Analyses and Languages Constructs for Object-Oriented Application Evolution [RMOD]

Publication date :

2011-04-20

English keyword(s) :

software visualization
reengineering
cycle
package
dependency

HAL domain(s) :

Informatique [cs]/Langage de programmation [cs.PL]

English abstract : [en]

Understanding the package organization of a large application is a challenging and critical task since it allows developers to better maintain the application. Several ap- proaches show in different ways software structure. ...
Show more >Understanding the package organization of a large application is a challenging and critical task since it allows developers to better maintain the application. Several ap- proaches show in different ways software structure. Fewer show modularity issues at the package level. We focus on modularity issues due to cyclic dependencies between packages. Most approaches detect Strongly Connected Components (SCC) in a graph of dependencies. However, SCC detection does not allow one to easily understand and remove cyclic dependencies in legacy software displaying dozens of packages all dependent on each other. This paper presents i) a heuristic to focus on shared dependencies between cycles in SCC and ii) CycleTable, a visualization showing interesting dependencies to efficiently remove cycles in the system. This visualization is completed with enriched cells, small views displaying the internals of a dependency [LDDB09]. We performed i) a case study which shows that the shared dependency heuristic highlights dependencies to be removed, and ii) a comparative study which shows that CycleTable is useful for the task of breaking cycles in a SCC compared to a normal node-link representation.Show less >

Language :

Anglais

Collections :