Component Identification From Existing Object Oriented System Using Hierarchical Clustering

One of the important tasks in software engineering is software architecture modeling. High level software architecture is useful in all phases of software life cycle. Component based software architecture is beneficial as it is useful for reusing system parts represented as components. Most of the existing object-oriented systems do not have reliable software architecture as system evolves. To deal with this problem, the authors have proposed approach of architecture recovery which aims to extract component based architecture from existing object oriented system using existing dependencies among classes and agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm. In this paper, they will identify components from existing object oriented system. The tool has been developed for this purpose. They have evaluated the feasibility of this tool on Java software.