Improving Software Modularity Using Software Remodularization: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Long-period maintenance of software often causes the original program modularization to decay, resulting in a degraded quality of the software. Placement of software artifacts, namely code files or classes in a suboptimal manner among software packages is one of the most common causes of this decaying modularization of software. Software remodularization (remodularization) is an old reverse engineering approach that helps in alleviating this issue by improving the quality of software modularization. However, in literature, a multitude of software remodularization approaches exists leaving researchers and developers in a dilemma of choosing appropriate remodularization criteria. Therefore, this paper carries out a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of the last two decades and presents concise information by answering different relevant research questions important to both developers and researchers of this field. This paper considers 54 research articles as primary studies.