Concept analysis as a framework for mining functional features from legacy code

Abstract

Legacy OO applications typically implement a set of functional features which, in the absence of aspect-oriented techniques to separately develop and maintain them, end up embodied in the same class hierarchies. We identified three types of design techniques used to implement that embodiment: a) multiple inheritance- or simulations thereof, b) aggregation/delegation, and c) what we referred to as ad-hoc implementation. We are interested in identifying and isolating software artifacts that implement distinct functional features. Here, we explore the use of concept analysis to detect ad-hoc implementations of functional features. We present the principles underlying our overall approach, a formalization of the problem in terms of concept analysis, a method for identifying functional features based on the construction and exploration of the concept latice, and the results of an experimental validation study. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.