Improving software through automatic untangling of cyclic dependencies

Abstract

Cyclic dependencies among software components are considered an architectural problem that increases the development time and prevents proper reuse. One cause for the existence of such dependencies is the improper organization of elements into components. Optimal reorganization of the components that resolves the cyclic dependencies in large and complex software systems is extremely difficult to perform manually and is not computationally feasible to perform automatically. We present an approach for automatic untangling of cyclic dependencies among components for cycles of any size, having direct or transitive dependencies on one another. Our approach aims at minimizing the modifications to the original structure of the system, while taking into account various architectural properties. We evaluate our solution on twelve open source and three industrial applications. We demonstrate its applicability and value through architectural metrics and feedback from system architects. Copyright © 2014 ACM.