Search-based Improvement of Subsystem Decompositions

The subsystem decomposition of a software system degrades gradually during its lifetime and therefore it gets harder and harder to maintain. As a result this decomposition needs to be reconditioned from time to time. The problem is to determine a suitable subsystem decomposition that can be used as a basis for future maintenance tasks. This paper describes a new methodology that computes such a subsystem decomposition by optimizing metrics and heuristics of good subsystem design. The main idea is to treat this task as a search problem and to solve it using a genetic algorithm.

Paper is available at the ACM Digital Library