Modeling Software Systems as Complex Networks: Analysis and Their Applications

Software systems are of great importance, whose quality will influence every walk of our life. However, with increase in their scale and complexity, we are unable to control their quality since only little is known about their actual internal structure. “We cannot control what we cannot measure.” Thus, to control these complex software systems, the first task that we should do is to measure their internal structure. In recent years, people applied the theories and techniques in the field of complex networks to systematically investigate the structure of software systems by representing software systems as networks (i.e., software networks), and many interesting and useful results have been revealed. In this work, we aim to briefly review some recent research advances in the interdisciplinary research between complex networks and software engineering, including modeling, analysis, and applications. Specifically, we first describe some novel techniques to model the structural details of a specific software system. Then, based on these modeling techniques, we introduce some research work on characterizing the static and dynamic structural properties of software systems. Third, we describe some promising applications of software networks in real-world scenarios. Finally, we suggest some future research topics.