Concept-based Source Code Analysis for Software Maintenance

Abstract

Designing, understanding and maintaining the source code is a crucial task in reengineering for software maintenance. Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is a mathematical technique which has been applied in several fields and various problem domains of software research such as restructuring, correction of design defects, and object-oriented class identification tasks because it is useful to discover hierarchical groupings of objects having similar attribute. So, FCA is applied in the proposed system for analysis of software in order to support maintenance as it allows identifying concepts, or groupings of elements, that have common properties. Although FCA is composed of three parts- formal context, formal concept and concept lattice, this paper focuses to present detailed computing of formal concept in FCA with the proposed algorithm.