Abstract:
The class hierarchy is an important step of an
objected-oriented software development.
Designing and maintaining the class hierarchy
for reverse engineering is a difficult task.
However, Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is a
strong tool which provides a natural theoretical
framework for class hierarchy design and
maintenance because it can guarantee maximal
factorization while preserving specializing
relationships. Relational Concept Analysis
(RCA), an extension of FCA, is an efficient
approach to allow dealing with entities described
by binary attributes and by relations with the
other entities. Moreover, object-oriented design
metrics are essential part of software
environment. So, our proposed system consists of
two main tasks. First, we propose an approach
for refactoring class hierarchy in object-oriented
design with the theoretical strength of FCA and
RCA. Next, we focus on a set of object-oriented
design metrics that can be used to evaluate the
impact of the resulted object-oriented design.