Empirical analysis of software coupling networks in object-oriented software systems

The increasing scale and complexity of software systems have led to a large amount of work being performed in the area of software architecture of object-oriented systems. For the purpose of reasonable description of software structure, we make use of complex network theory to characterize and describe their macroscopic properties. We propose a directed software coupling network, and then empirical analysis of four open source software is implemented. We summarize the general statistical features of software coupling network, and find that software coupling network is of small-world and scale-free property, the exponents of in-degree and out-degree distributions are different, and the betweenness distribution of SCN is also power law. Furthermore, we analyzed the causes of behaviors software coupling network possessed.