MaDHS: Many‐objective discrete harmony search to improve existing package design

Recently, many computational intelligence algorithms have been proposed to address software remodularization problem. Unfortunately, it has been observed that the performance of optimizers degrades with the optimization problem containing more than three objectives. In this paper, we propose a many‐objective discrete harmony search (MaDHS) to address the software remodularization problem having more than three objectives. The basic idea of MaDHS is that it uses the quality indicator I ϵ + and external archive to rank and store the nondominated solutions. Along with MaDHS, five remodularization objectives, ie, low coupling, high cohesion, low modification degree, quality of class distribution, and low package instability have also been adapted to improve the package structure of existing object‐oriented software systems. To improve the accuracy of modularization solution, the coupling and cohesion objectives are formulated in terms of various dimensions of direct coupling relationships. To test the supremacy of the proposed approach, it is evaluated over eight real‐world object‐oriented software systems. Simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms the other existing approaches in terms of couplings, cohesion, modularization quality, modularization merit factor, rate per refactoring of achieved improvement, and external developers view.