Discovering unanticipated dependency schemas in class hierarchies

Object-oriented applications are difficult to extend and maintain, due to the presence of implicit dependencies in the inheritance hierarchy. Although these dependencies often correspond to well-known schemas, such as hook and template methods, new unanticipated dependency schemas occur in practice,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNinth European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering pp. 62 - 71
Main Authors Arevalo, G., Ducasse, S., Nierstrasz, O.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 2005
Subjects
Application software
Best practices
Class Hierarchies
Computer architecture
Concept Analysis
Contracts
Lattices
Object oriented modeling
Schemas
Software maintenance
Software systems
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Summary:Object-oriented applications are difficult to extend and maintain, due to the presence of implicit dependencies in the inheritance hierarchy. Although these dependencies often correspond to well-known schemas, such as hook and template methods, new unanticipated dependency schemas occur in practice, and can consequently be hard to recognize and detect. To tackle this problem, we have applied concept analysis to automatically detect recurring dependency schemas in class hierarchies used in object-oriented applications. In this paper we describe our mapping of OO dependencies to the formal framework of concept analysis, we apply our approach to a non-trivial case study, and we report on the kinds of dependencies that are uncovered with this technique. As a result, we show how the discovered dependency schemas correspond not only to good design practices, but also to "bad smells" in design.
ISBN:9780769523040
0769523048
ISSN:1534-5351
2640-7574
DOI:10.1109/CSMR.2005.24