Structural Characteristic Analysis of Large Scale Object-Oriented Software and Its Evolution Based on Complex Network Theory

Many real-world networks are discovered to be complex networks in the last few years. Because software systems become more and more complicated, we attempt to apply complex network theory to study the large object-oriented software program with two versions in this paper. It is shown that large object-oriented software network is a scale-free network by computing its characteristic parameters. Especially, with increase of softwarepsilas scale, scale-free property is more evident. The statistical characteristic of software development network in which people are engaged is simply investigated and it also has properties of small world, and scale free. Some significant advices for software design and development are proposed.