MoJo: a distance metric for software clusterings

The software clustering problem has attracted much attention recently, since it is an integral part of the process of reverse engineering large software systems. A key problem in this research is the difficulty in comparing different approaches in an objective fashion. In this paper, we present a metric, called MoJo (Move-Join), that can be used in evaluating the similarity of two different decompositions of a software system. Our metric calculates a distance between two partitions of the same set of software resources. We begin by introducing the model we use. Then we present a heuristic algorithm that calculates the distance in an efficient fashion. Finally, we discuss some experiments that showcase the performance of the algorithm and the effectiveness of the metric