Software Botryology: Automatic Clustering of Software Systems

It has long been recognized that the decomposition of a large software system into meaningful subsystems is essential for both the development and maintenance phases of a software project We introduce the term Software Botryology for the area of research that at tempts to automatically cluster a software system In this paper we survey approaches to the cluster ing problem from researchers in the software engineer ing community We also present clustering techniques used in other disciplines and argue that their utiliza tion in a software context could lead to better solutions to the software clustering problem Finally we outline research challenges and open problems of interest