Identifying Objects Using Cluster And Concept Analysis

ArieVanDeursen and TobiasKuipers.

In 21st International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE-99, 1999, ACM, pp 246-255. http://www.cwi.nl/~arie/papers/split.pdf

Abstract

Many approaches to support (semi-automatic) identification of objects in LegacySystems take the data structures as starting point for candidate classes. Unfortunately, legacy data structures tend to grow over time, and may contain many unrelated fields at the time of migration. We propose a method for ObjectIdentification by semi-automatically restructuring the legacy data structures. Issues involved include the selection of record fields of interest, the identification of procedures actually dealing with such fields, and the construction of coherent groups of fields and procedures into candidate classes. We explore the use of ClusterAnalysis and ConceptAnalysis for the purpose of object identification, and we illustrate their effect on a 100,000 lines of code COBOL system. Furthermore, we use these results to contrast clustering with concept analysis techniques.