A study of the community structure of a complex software network

This paper presents a case study of a large software system, Netbeans 6.0, made of independent subsystems, which are analyzed as complex software networks. Starting from the source code we built the associated software graphs, where classes represent graph nodes and inter-class relationships represent graph edges. We computed various metrics for the software systems and found interdependences with various quantities computed by mean of the complex network analysis. In particular we found that the number of communities in which the software networks can be partitioned and their modularity, average path length and mean degree can be related to the amount of bugs detected in the system. This result can be useful to provide indications about the fault proneness of software clusters in terms of quantities related to the associated graph structure.