  Software re-modularization is an old preoccupation of reverse engineering
research. The advantages of a well structured or modularized system are well
known. Yet after so much time and efforts, the field seems unable to come up
with solutions that make a clear difference in practice. Recently, some
researchers started to question whether some basic assumptions of the field
were not overrated. The main one consists in evaluating the
high-cohesion/low-coupling dogma with metrics of unknown relevance. In this
paper, we study a real structuring case (on the Eclipse platform) to try to
better understand if (some) existing metrics would have helped the software
engineers in the task. Results show that the cohesion and coupling metrics used
in the experiment did not behave as expected and would probably not have helped
the maintainers reach there goal. We also measured another possible
restructuring which is to decrease the number of cyclic dependencies between
modules. Again, the results did not meet expectations.

Software Engineering