Revisiting the Delta IC Approach to Component Recovery

Component recovery supports program understanding, architecture recovery, and re-use. Among the best known techniques for detection of re-usable objects (related global variables and their accessor functions) is Delta-IC [2]. This paper re-visits the original approach and extends it in different ways. It describes a variant of Delta-IC suitable for reverse engineering that omits the slicing step of the original approach. The underlying metric of Delta-IC is extended toward types integrating ideas of the Internal echnique [32] such that abstract data types can also be detected. Furthermore, the connectivity metric of Delta-IC is combined with a cohesion metric based on vertex connectivity. The new metrics and the new algorithm for reverse engineering are quantitatively evaluated using the framework proposed in [19] as a standard evaluation of clustering techniques for component recovery.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: WCRE
• Authors: Gerardo Canfora, Jörg Czeranski, Rainer Koschke
• Keywords: Component Recovery, Original Approach, Reverse Engineering, Software Engineering, WCRE 2000