Formal Concept Analysis-Based Class Hierarchy Design in Object-Oriented Software Development

The class hierarchy is an important aspect of object-oriented software development. Design and maintenance of such a hierarchy is a difficult task that is often accomplished without any clear guidance or tool support. Formal concept analysis provides a natural theoretical framework for this problem because it can guarantee maximal factorization while preserving specialization relationships. The framework can be useful for several software development scenarios within the class hierarchy life-cycle such as design from scratch using a set of class specifications, or a set of object examples, refactoring/reengineering from existing object code or from the observation of the actual use of the classes in applications and hierarchy evolution by incrementally adding new classes. The framework can take into account different levels of specification details and suggests a number of well-defined alternative designs. These alternatives can be viewed as normal forms for class hierarchies where...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: FCA
• Authors: Robert Godin, Petko Valtchev
• Keywords: Class Hierarchy, Class Hierarchy Life-cycle, FCA 2005, Formal Concept Analysis, Formal Methods