Retrieving Formal Concepts from Class-Method Data Table

Abstract

In maintenance of object-oriented software, one of the most important concepts is inheritance, which organizes classes into a hierarchy. The relationships among packages, classes, access modifiers, inherited classes and methods can affect on modification of the software. The proposed system uses Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to discover groups of closely related classes. The groups of classes can assist programmers to know the high level structure of large software systems without prior knowledge, and programmers can learn the classes in the same group together. The class-method data table is constructed for retrieving formal concepts (group of classes). Then, the formal concepts are retrieved from the class-method data table by using the proposed Concept_Computing algorithm. After applying FCA and forming a lattice of given class specifications, one can easily analyze the structure, change effects of the methods and dependencies of the classes. Seven static java source projects are analyzed in this system.