Hierarchical Clustering of Distributed Object-Oriented Software Systems: A Generic Solution for Software-Hardware Mismatch Problem

During the software lifecycle, the software structure is subject to many changes in order to fulfill the customer’s requirements. In Distributed Object Oriented systems, software engineers face many challenges to solve the software-hardware mismatch problem in which the software structure does not match the customer’s underlying hardware. A major design problem of Object Oriented software systems is the efficient distribution of software classes among the different nodes in the system while maintaining two features: low-coupling and high software quality. In this paper, we present a new methodology for efficiently restructuring Distributed Object Oriented software systems to improve the overall system performance and to solve the softwarehardware mismatch problem. Our method has two main phases. In the first phase, we use the hierarchical clustering method to restructure the target software application. As a result, all the possible clustering solutions that could be applied to the target software application are generated. In the second phase, we decide on the best-fit clustering solution according to the customer hardware organization. Key-Words: software restructuring, hierarchical clustering, distributed systems, object oriented software, performance analysis, low coupling.