Complex network analysis in Java application systems

doi:10.3969/j.issn.1000-5641.2017.01.006

Abstract

Abstract:

A lot of empirical studies have demonstrated that Java software system is a kind of artificial complex network and its in-degree distribution obeys the power law, while out-degree distribution is lognormal. However, most experiment objects in these studies are Java development tools, such as JDK, log4j and Tomcat, and the type of data analyzed in dependence graph is limited, because they only consider some class dependence relationships and omit certain useful data types, like member variables and local variables. In this paper, we all useful dependence relationships between entities or modules on both class and function levels, and we further propose a novel method to transform a system network into a weighted directed graph. Comprehensive experiment results show that the in- and out-degree of 10 types of Java application systems mostly fit the power law distributions, and our proposed method to detect the scale-free feature of a weighted and directed network is effective in analyzing Java application systems.

Key words: complex network, Java application systems, power law distribution, class dependence graph, function dependence graph

SHEN Ping-ting, CHEN Liang-yu. Complex network analysis in Java application systems[J]. Journal of East China Normal University(Natural Sc, doi: 10.3969/j.issn.1000-5641.2017.01.006.

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