Supervised Software Modularisation

This paper is concerned with the challenge of reorganising a software system into modules that both obey sound design principles and are sensible to domain experts. The problem has given rise to several unsupervised automated approaches that use techniques such as clustering and Formal Concept Analysis. Although results are often partially correct, they usually require refinement to enable the developer to integrate domain knowledge. This paper presents the SUMO algorithm, an approach that is complementary to existing techniques and enables the maintainer to refine their results. The algorithm is guaranteed to eventually yield a result that is satisfactory to the maintainer, and the evaluation on a diverse range of systems shows that this occurs with a reasonably low amount of effort.