Scale-Free Property in Large Scale Object-Oriented Software and Its Significance on Software Engineering

Many real-world software systems become more and more complicated. Complex network theory is applied 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 with power-law distribution of degree, low shortest path length and high clustering coefficient. In particular, with increase of softwarepsilas scale, scale-free property is more and more evident. Then some significant advices inspired from scale-free property are proposed for software engineering.