Evaluating the Impact of Refactoring of Class Hierarchies for Software Maintenance

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.