An Approach to Object-oriented Program Understanding

An automated tool to assist in the understanding of legacy code can be useful both in the areas of software reuse and software maintenance. Most previous work in this area has concentrated on functionally-oriented code. Whereas object-oriented code has been shown to be inherently more reusable than functionally-oriented code, in many cases the eventual reuse of the object-oriented code was not considered during development. The research described in this paper addresses an approach to the automated understanding of object-oriented code as an aid to the reuse of object-oriented code. 1.0 Introduction The ability of a later software project to benefit from the effort involved in producing software products on a previous project has been a long term goal of software developers. The reuse of some of the software products on a subsequent software product can save many of the costs associated with redevelopment. One of the difficulties that tends to hinder software reuse lies in the numero..