Object-oriented concept analysis for software imodularisation

Abstract

Modularity is one of the most important principles in software engineering and a necessity for every practical software. Since the design space of software is generally quite large, it is valuable to provide automatic means to help modularising it. An automatic technique for software modularisation using object-oriented concept analysis (OOCA) is proposed. The proposed technique is strongly inspired by the success of reverse engineering techniques based on formal concept analysis (FCA). However, our experience shows that FCA-based techniques generally result in fine-grained modules and, thus, may be inadequate for modularising large-scale designs. To overcome this weakness, the authors employ OOCA, a recent proposal for concept formulations. OOCA enables to provide coarse concepts as module candidates while keeping the advantage of FCA techniques. To the best of the authors' knowledge, it is the first work to apply OOCA in software engineering research. To illustrate the potential of the approach, the authors perform a software modularisation case study on a real insurance software design with comparison.