ModularityCheck: A Tool for Assessing Modularity using Co-Change Clusters

TL;DR

ModularityCheck is a tool that evaluates software package modularity by analyzing co-change clusters derived from version control and issue reports, aiding in understanding and improving modular design.

Contribution

The paper introduces ModularityCheck, a novel tool that assesses modularity through co-change clusters, integrating data extraction, metric generation, and visualization.

Findings

Effective identification of co-change clusters

Enhanced understanding of modularity issues

Case study demonstrating tool's utility

Abstract

It is widely accepted that traditional modular structures suffer from the dominant decomposition problem. Therefore, to improve current modularity views, it is important to investigate the impact of design decisions concerning modularity in other dimensions, as the evolutionary view. In this paper, we propose the ModularityCheck tool to assess package modularity using co-change clusters, which are sets of classes that usually changed together in the past. Our tool extracts information from version control platforms and issue reports, retrieves co-change clusters, generates metrics related to co-change clusters, and provides visualizations for assessing modularity. We also provide a case study to evaluate the tool. http://youtu.be/7eBYa2dfIS8