Programming style based program partition

Program partitioning is a key step towards automatic program understanding and source code reuse. Traditional methods are non-linear. The NP-hard complexity constitutes a computational barrier for partitioning legacy software systems properly. In this paper, we propose a new method that can partition a source program into program modules within a timescale that is linear with the size of the program. The method uses special heuristic knowledge based on psychological analysis of human programming styles, to partition a source program into domain-oriented program modules. The outcome of this research is being used by BT, who have also filed for a patent