Discovering Comprehension Pitfalls in Class Hierarchies

Mihancea, Petru Florin; Marinescu, Radu

doi:10.1109/csmr.2009.31

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 10 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Analyzing class hierarchies with criteria of code or interface reuse, Mihancea et al, [54,55] introduce the concept of comprehension pitfall as a design situation in which the polymorphic manipulation of a design entity (e.g., method) can be easily misunderstood. The pitfalls are defined using metric-based rules to support their automatic detection.…”

Section: Query-based Engines To Understand Object-oriented Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Generating a catalog of unanticipated schemas in class hierarchies using Formal Concept Analysis

Arévalo

Ducasse

Gordillo

et al. 2010

Information and Software Technology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Context: Inheritance is the cornerstone of object-oriented development, supporting conceptual modeling, subtype polymorphism and software reuse. But inheritance can be used in subtle ways that make complex systems hard to understand and extend, due to the presence of implicit dependencies in the inheritance hierarchy.Objective: Although these dependencies often specify well-known schemas (i.e., recurrent design or coding patterns, such as hook and template methods), new unanticipated dependency schemas arise in practice, and can consequently be hard to recognize and detect. Thus, a developer making changes or extensions to an object-oriented system needs to understand these implicit contracts defined by the dependencies between a class and its subclasses, or risk that seemingly innocuous changes break them. Method:To tackle this problem, we have developed an approach based on Formal Concept Analysis. Our FoCARE methodology (Formal Concept Analysis based-Reverse Engineering) identifies undocumented hierarchical dependencies in a hierarchy by taking into account the existing structure and behavior of classes and subclasses.Results: We validate our approach by applying it to a large and non-trivial case study, yielding a catalog of Hierarchy Schemas, each one composed of a set of dependencies over methods and attributes in a class hierarchy. We show how the discovered dependency schemas can be used not only to identify good design practices, but also to expose bad smells in design, thereby helping developers in initial reengineering phases to develop a first mental model of a system. Although some of the identified schemas are already documented in existing literature, with our approach based on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA), we are also able to identify previously unidentified schemas. * Principal corresponding author Conclusions: FCA is an effective tool because it is an ideal classification mining tool to identify commonalities between software artifacts, and usually these commonalities reveal known and unknown characteristics of the software artifacts. We also show that once a catalog of useful schemas stabilizes after several runs of FoCARE, the added cost of FCA is no longer needed.

show abstract

Section: Query-based Engines To Understand Object-oriented Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Generating a catalog of unanticipated schemas in class hierarchies using Formal Concept Analysis

Arévalo

Ducasse

Gordillo

et al. 2010

Information and Software Technology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…An integral-interface i does not replicate all the information in its implementing classes -since these latter can completely differ in their semantics and behaviors [9], [5], [10], and also define additional methods to those declared in i. Taking for example the implementing classes C1 and C2 of the interface I1 (Figure 1 For the implementation, we use the Moose toolkit [29] because its meta-model language, FAMIX, includes descriptions of all software entities (e.g., classes, interfaces, methods, attributes etc.)…”

Section: Adapting Cohesion Metricsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recently, Mihancea and Marinescu [9] studied several recurrent patterns of using inheritance and polymorphism that can impact program comprehensibility (comprehension pitfalls). One of their comprehension pitfalls is the "Partial Typing", which outlines that interfaces cannot be always assumed as complete types of all their implementing classes.…”

Section: B Refactoring Supportmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

How We Design Interfaces, and How to Assess It

Abdeen

Sahraoui

Shata

2013

2013 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract-Interfaces are widely used in Java applications as central design elements for modular programming to increase program reusability and to ease maintainability of software systems. Despite the importance of interfaces and a considerable research effort that has investigated code quality and concrete classes' design, few works have investigated interfaces' design. In this paper, we empirically study interfaces' design and its impact on the design quality of implementing classes (i.e., class cohesion) analyzing twelve Java object-oriented applications. In this study we propose the "Interface-Implementations Model" that we use to adapt class cohesion metrics to assess the cohesion of interfaces based on their implementations. Moreover, we use other metrics that evaluate the conformance of interfaces to the well-known design principles "Program to an Interface, not an implementation" and "Interface Segregation Principle". The results show that software developers abide well by the interface design principles cited above, but they neglect the cohesion property. The results also show that such design practices of interfaces lead to a degraded cohesion of implementing classes, where these latter would be characterized by a worse cohesion than other classes.

show abstract

Automatic inference of model fields and their representation

Balint

Minea

2011

Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Formal Techniques for Java-Like Programs

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Discovering Comprehension Pitfalls in Class Hierarchies

Cited by 3 publications

References 10 publications

Generating a catalog of unanticipated schemas in class hierarchies using Formal Concept Analysis

Generating a catalog of unanticipated schemas in class hierarchies using Formal Concept Analysis

How We Design Interfaces, and How to Assess It

Automatic inference of model fields and their representation

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About