Towards a Client Driven Characterization of Class Hierarchies

Mihancea, Petru Florin

doi:10.1109/icpc.2006.48

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 11 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The most important future work direction is to define a dedicated comprehension / reengineering process for class hierarchies, based on our visualizations and on our previous work [17]. As another direction, we plan to also take into consideration the relevance of a variable for an instruction while computing the LA metric.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Type Highlighting: A Client-Driven Visual Approach for Class Hierarchies Reengineering

Mihancea

2008

2008 Eighth IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Polymorphism and class hierarchies are key to increasing the extensibility of an object-oriented program but also raise challenges for program comprehension. Despite many advances in understanding and restructuring class hierarchies, there is no direct support to analyze and understand the design decisions that drive their polymorphic usage. In this paper we introduce a metric-based visual approach to capture the extent to which the clients of a hierarchy polymorphically manipulate that hierarchy. A visual pattern vocabulary is also presented in order to facilitate the communication between analysts. Initial evaluation shows that our techniques aid program comprehension by effectively visualizing large quantities of information, and can help detect several design problems.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Type Highlighting: A Client-Driven Visual Approach for Class Hierarchies Reengineering

Mihancea

2008

2008 Eighth IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…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

“…There is no single fashion to characterize the usage of inheritance [15,2,16]. Two properties of inheritance makes it hard.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding the use of inheritance with visual patterns

Denier

Sahraoui

2009

2009 3rd International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The goal of this work is to visualize inheritance in objectoriented programs to help its comprehension. We propose a single, compact view of all class hierarchies at once using a custom Sunburst layout. It enables to quickly discover interesting facts across classes while preserving the essential relationship between parent and children classes. We explain how standard inheritance metrics are mapped into our visualization. Additionally, we define a new metric characterizing similar children classes. Using these metrics and the proposed layout, a set of common visual patterns is derived. These patterns allow the programmer to quickly understand how inheritance is used and provide answers to some essential questions when performing program comprehension tasks. Our approach is evaluated through a case study that involves examples from large programs, demonstrating its scalability.

show abstract

Towards a Client Driven Characterization of Class Hierarchies

Cited by 8 publications

References 11 publications

Type Highlighting: A Client-Driven Visual Approach for Class Hierarchies Reengineering

Type Highlighting: A Client-Driven Visual Approach for Class Hierarchies Reengineering

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

Understanding the use of inheritance with visual patterns

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About