Critical Review of the Bunch: A Well-Known Tool for the Recovery and Maintenance of Software System Structures

Abstract: Lack of up-to-date software documentation hinders the software evolution and maintenance processes, as simply the software structure and code could be easily misunderstood and not comprehended. One approach to overcome such problems is to extract and reconstruct the software structure from the available source code so that it can be assessed against the required changes. Such approach is known as Software clustering. Bunch is a well-known tool for structure reconstructing and maintaining of software systems. As the maintenance of software costs a lot, Bunch is usually employed to reconstruct the structure of software and consequently making required changes. The aim of this paper is to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of the Bunch; if problems and proposals offered in this paper are studied and solved, this tool will be turned to be a useful tool for structure recovering and maintenance of a software system.

Keywords: Software System; Software Structure; Bunch; Software maintenance.