Harmony Search-Based Approach for Multi-Objective Software Architecture Reconstruction

Abstract

The success of any software system highly depends on the quality of architectural design. It has been observed that over time, the quality of software architectural design gets degraded. The software system with poor architecture design is difficult to understand and maintain. To improve the architecture of a software system, multiple design goals or objectives (often conflicting) need to be optimized simultaneously. To address such types of multi-objective optimization problems a variety of metaheuristic-oriented computational intelligence algorithms have been proposed. In existing approaches, harmony search (HS) algorithm has been demonstrated as an effective approach for numerous types of complex optimization problems. Despite the successful application of the HS algorithm on different non-software engineering optimization problems, it gained little attention in the direction of architecture reconstruction problem. In this study, we customize the original HS algorithm and propose a multi-objective harmony search algorithm for software architecture reconstruction (MoHS-SAR). To demonstrate the effectiveness of the MoHS-SAR, it has been tested on seven object-oriented software projects and compared with the existing related multi-objective evolutionary algorithms in terms of different software architecture quality metrics and metaheuristic performance criteria. The experimental results show that the MoHS-SAR performs better compared to the other related multi-objective evolutionary algorithms. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.