The impact of component interconnections on software quality: a network analysis approach

Abstract

The growing complexity of software has posed challenges for the design, understanding and maintenance of software. Software developers often spend a lot of effort on understanding how software components are connected. Through analysis of the data obtained from a real software application, this paper demonstrates that network analysis approaches can help understand software component interconnections and their impact on software quality. Additionally, this paper shows that there is a correlation between the number of bugs found in an application and a set of measures used in component (interconnection) networks. Furthermore, a case study showed that the software performance improved over two releases as a result of improving the component network.