Software botryology. Automatic clustering of software systems

Abstract

It has long been recognized that the decomposition of a large software system into "meaningful" subsystems is essential for both the development and maintenance phases of a software project. We introduce the term "software botryology" for the area of research that attempts to automatically cluster a software system ("botrys" is the ancient Greek word for a cluster of grapes). In this paper, we survey approaches to the clustering problem from researchers in the software engineering community. We also present clustering techniques used in other disciplines and argue that their utilization in a software context could lead to better solutions to the software clustering problem. Finally, we outline research challenges and open problems of interest.