Investigating the effect of software packaging on modular structure stability

In object-oriented development, packages form the basic modular structural components of large-scale software systems. Packaging processes aim to group classes together to provide well-identified functions/services to the rest of the system. In this context, it is widely believed that packaging quality has an influence on the software stability so that it should be useful predictors for modular structural stability. In this paper, we investigate the effect of packaging configurations on the modular structure stability of object-oriented systems. Using genetic algorithms, we conducted a series of experiments to find the relation between the packaging quality and modular structure stability. We conducted experiments on open source systems using an automatic packaging approach recently proposed by the authors. Results show that the stability of releases automatically packaged using that approach was better or at least comparable to those of the corresponding original releases manually packaged by the software developers. Moreover, the different parameters settings of the genetic algorithms used in our experiments play an important role to improve the overall quality. The experimental results suggest that the considered packaging approach is useful for practitioners to develop architecturally stable software systems.