Automatic reverse engineering of classes’ relationships

Abstract

Classes are the core of object oriented systems. Any maintenance activity includes performing a code change to one or more classes. Any code change to one class may affect other classes in the project. So, developers need to be aware and fully understand the structure and the relationships between classes. This paper proposes a technique to automatically extract various types of class’s relationships from source code. The proposed technique extracts relationships among classes and measures their involvements in relationships. Fan-in and Fan-out metrics are used to give developers more comprehensive picture about the current status of coupling for each class.