Generating a catalog of unanticipated schemas in class hierarchies using formal concept analysis

Título:

Generating a catalog of unanticipated schemas in class hierarchies using formal concept analysis

Autor:

Arévalo, Gabriela Beatriz

Colaboradores:

; Ducasse, Stéphane; Gordillo, Silvia Ethel; Nierstrasz, Oscar

Temas:

DESARROLLO ORIENTADO A OBJETOS

En:

Information and Software Technology 52(11) p. 1167-1187

Resumen:

Context: Inheritance is the cornerstone of object-oriented development, supporting conceptual modeling, subtype polymorphism and software reuse. But inheritance can be used in subtle ways that make com- plex systems hard to understand and extend, due to the presence of implicit dependencies in the inher- itance hierarchy. Objective: Although these dependencies often specify well-known schemas (i.e., recurrent design or cod- ing patterns, such as hook and template methods), new unanticipated dependency schemas arise in prac- tice, and can consequently be hard to recognize and detect. Thus, a developer making changes or extensions to an object-oriented system needs to understand these implicit contracts defined by the dependencies between a class and its subclasses, or risk that seemingly innocuous changes break them. Method: To tackle this problem, we have developed an approach based on Formal Concept Analysis. Our Formal Concept Analysis based-Reverse Engineering methodology (FoCARE) identifies undocumented hierarchical dependencies in a hierarchy by taking into account the existing structure and behavior of classes and subclasses. Results: We validate our approach by applying it to a large and non-trivial case study, yielding a catalog of hierarchy schemas, each one composed of a set of dependencies over methods and attributes in a class hierarchy. We show how the discovered dependency schemas can be used not only to identify good design practices, but also to expose bad smells in design, thereby helping developers in initial reengineer- ing phases to develop a first mental model of a system. Although some of the identified schemas are already documented in existing literature, with our approach based on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA), we are also able to identify previously unidentified schemas. Conclusions: FCA is an effective tool because it is an ideal classification mining tool to identify common- alities between software artifacts, and usually these commonalities reveal known and unknown charac- teristics of the software artifacts. We also show that once a catalog of useful schemas stabilizes after several runs of FoCARE, the added cost of FCA is no longer needed.

URL/DOI:

http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00531498

Medio:

Soporte electrónico

Tipo de documento:

Artículo

Descripción física:

1 archivo (1,2 MB)

Idioma:

Inglés

Publicación:

, 2010

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