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Last updated on Thursday, November 16, 2023
@article{ZaidmanJSME2008,
author = {Andy Zaidman and Serge Demeyer},
journal = {International Journal on Software Maintenance:
Research and Practice},
note = {SCI impact factor 0.457, ranked 60 / 79},
number = {6},
pages = {387-417},
publisher = {John Wiley \& Sons},
title = {Automatic Identification of Key Classes in a Software
System Using Webmining Techniques},
volume = {20},
year = {2008},
abstract = {Software engineers new to a project are often stuck
sorting through hundreds of classes in order to find
those few classes that offer a significant insight
into the inner workings of the software project. To
help stimulate this process, we propose a technique
which can identify the most important classes in a
system, or the key classes of that system. Software
engineers can use these classes to focus their
understanding efforts when starting to work on a new
software project. Those \emph{key classes} are
typically characterized with having a lot of
``control'' within the application. In order to find
these controlling classes, we present a detection
approach that is based on dynamic coupling and
webmining. We demonstrate the potential of our
technique using two open source software systems,
which have a rich documentation set. During the case
studies we use dynamically gathered coupling
information and vary between a number of coupling
metrics. The case studies show that we are able to
retrieve 90\% of the classes deemed important by the
orginal maintainers of the systems, while maintaining
a level of precision of around 50\%.},
annote = {internationaljournal},
doi = {10.1002/smr.370},
}