On Structural Properties of Large-Scale Software Systems: From the Perspective of Complex Networks

From the viewpoint of network, large-scale computer software system scan be regarded as complex networks composed of interacting units at different levels of granularity (such as functions, classes, packages, source files, etc.). In this paper, the collaboration relationships between header files in the source node of Linux kernels, which are representative examples of large-scale open-source software systems, are analyzed by constructing weighted network-header file collaboration network (HFCN). Through using appropriate non-weighted and weighted quantities, the complex structural properties, the weight distribution and the impact between them of these networks are characterized and analyzed. These results can provide a better description of the organizational principles at the basis of the architecture of source codes in large computer software systems.