Identifying Traits with Formal Concept Analysis

Lienhard, Adrian; Ducasse, Stéphane; Arévalo, Gabriela (November 2005). Identifying Traits with Formal Concept Analysis. In: 20th IEEE/ACM international Conference on Automated software engineering (pp. 66-75). IEEE Computer Society 10.1145/1101908.1101921

Text Lien05aIdentifyingTraits.pdf - Published Version Restricted to registered users only Available under License Publisher holds Copyright. Download (214kB)

Traits are basically mixins or interfaces but with method bodies. In languages that support traits, classes are composed out of traits. There are two main advantages with traits. Firstly, decomposing existing classes into traits from which they can be recomposed improves the factoring of hierarchies. Secondly it increases the library reuse potential by providing more reusable traits. Identifying traits and decomposing class hierarchies into traits is therefore an important and challenging task to facilitate maintainability and evolution. In this paper we present how we use Formal Concept Analysis to identify traits in inheritance hierarchies. Our approach is two-staged: first we identify within a hierarchy maximal groups of methods that have a set of classes in common, second we cluster cohesive groups of methods based on method invocations as potential traits. We applied our approach on two significant hierarchies and compare our results with the manual refactorization of the same code which was done by the authors of traits.

Interest & Impact

Downloads

0 since deposited on 18 Oct 2017
0 in the past 12 months

Citations

5 Citations in Web of Science ®
6 Citations in Scopus

Search

in Google Scholar™

Services

Actions (login required)

Edit item

Actions (login required)

Edit item