Software restructuring is a crucial problem in software engineering. Improving the package structure of a large and complex object-oriented software system with minimum possible modification is an emerging software restructuring problem. To address the different aspects of software restructuring problems, many approaches based on deterministic and search-based optimization algorithms have been proposed. The inability of deterministic algorithms in addressing large and complex software restructuring problems encourages the researchers and practitioners to apply the search-based optimization algorithms. Most of the existing search-based software restructuring approaches mainly focus on improving the quality of existing package structure from various quality metrics perspectives. So, restructuring solution produced by such approaches can be better from the software quality metrics perspective and may not be better from the developers’ perspective. To improve the software package structure that can be accepted from the quality metrics perspective and the developers’ perspective, we propose a search-based software restructuring approach. To this contribution, we incorporate various favorable strategies corresponding to the nature of the software package restructuring problem in the framework of the harmony search algorithm. To guide the optimization process toward an expected software restructuring solution, we also redefine the objective functions. To validate the performance of our proposed approach, we apply it over eight object-oriented software projects. The obtained results show that the proposed approach does improve not only the quality of the package structure from the quality metrics perspective but also the developers’ perspective. Additionally, it also maintains the minimum possible modifications per improvement of package quality.

软件重构是软件工程中的一个关键问题。以最少的修改改进大型复杂的面向对象软件系统的包结构是一个新兴的软件重构问题。为了解决软件重构问题的不同方面，已经提出了许多基于确定性和基于搜索的优化算法的方法。确定性算法无法解决大型复杂的软件重构问题，这鼓励研究人员和从业人员应用基于搜索的优化算法。大多数现有的基于搜索的软件重构方法主要侧重于从各种质量度量角度提高现有包结构的质量。所以，从软件质量度量的角度来看，由这种方法产生的重组解决方案可能更好，但从开发人员的角度来看可能并不好。为了从质量度量的角度和开发人员的角度改进可以接受的软件包结构，我们提出了一种基于搜索的软件重构方法。为此，我们在和声搜索算法的框架中结合了与软件包重组问题的性质相对应的各种有利策略。为了引导优化过程朝着预期的软件重组解决方案发展，我们还重新定义了目标函数。为了验证我们提出的方法的性能，我们将其应用于八个面向对象的软件项目。获得的结果表明，所提出的方法不仅从质量度量的角度而且从开发人员的角度提高了包结构的质量。此外，它还可以在每次改进包装质量时保持尽可能少的修改。