Bulletin of Network Engineer and Informatics (BUFNETS)
Vol. 4 No. 2 (2026): BUFNETS (Bulletin of Network Engineer and Informatics) October 2026

Contribution Of Structural And Semantic Features To Cohesion In Software Module Clustering Using K-Means

Sandi Tendean (Universitas Widya Dharma Pontianak)
Stefanie Quinevera (Universitas Widya Dharma Pontianak)



Article Info

Publish Date
02 Oct 2026

Abstract

Understanding the modular structure of source code is a major challenge in software maintenance. Clustering classes into modules can assist reverse engineering, but its effectiveness depends on feature selection. This study compares the contribution of structural and semantic features to the cohesion of clustering results. Five projects developed using an object-oriented approach of varying sizes are used as test cases. K-means is run 50 times for each scenario, with the number of clusters fixed to the number of original packages. Structural features produce clusters with the highest internal cohesion across all projects, but their alignment with original packages is low. In contrast, semantic features yield very low internal cohesion; however, on three projects they are statistically more aligned with original packages compared to structural features. Feature combination does not provide meaningful improvement; semantic features tend to reduce cohesion without increasing package alignment. These findings indicate that no single feature type is universally best; feature selection must consider project characteristics and the intended goal

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

bufnets

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

The Journal invites original articles and is not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. Scopes: Information Technology: Software Engineering, Knowledge and Data Mining, Multimedia Technologies, Mobile Computing, Parallel/Distributed Computing, Computer Graphics, Virtual Reality, ...