An empirical study on modularization of object oriented software

Object-oriented programming is supposed to produce better modularized structure than structural programming in that it encourages related state and behavior to be organized together in the form of classes, thus facilitating reuse and maintenance. To test whether classes in object-oriented software are well modularized, we conduct empirical studies on real world object-oriented software. By employing method from network analysis, object-oriented software structures are characterized as networks of methods. Metric and methods from community discovery research are applied to the analysis of modularization. From the empirical results, we conclude that not all object-oriented software classes are well modularized and there is a need for research on modularization improvement for classes of objected-oriented software.