Identifying Modules Via Concept Analysis

We describe a general technique for identifying modules in programs that do not designate them explicitly. The method is based on concept analysis --- a branch of lattice theory that can be used to identify similarities among a set of objects based on their attributes. We discuss how concept analysis can identify potential modules using both "positive" and "negative" information. We present an algorithmic framework to construct a lattice of concepts from a program, where each concept represents a potential module. We describe an algorithm that, given a concept lattice, identifies possible ways of partitioning the program into modules. We discuss a prototype implementation and some results on small and medium-sized programs. Keywords: Concept analysis, modularization, software migration, software restructuring, reverse engineering, design recovery. 1 Introduction Many existing software systems were developed using programming languages and paradigms that do not incorporate object-orien..