An empirical study of a reverse engineering method for the aggregation relationship based on operation propagation

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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://140.128.103.80:8080/handle/310901/21849

Title:	An empirical study of a reverse engineering method for the aggregation relationship based on operation propagation
Authors:	Yeh, D., Sun, P.-C., Chu, W., Lin, C.-L., Yang, H.
Contributors:	Dept. of Computer Science, Tunghai University,
Keywords:	Aggregation relationship;Empirical method;Object-oriented;Reverse engineering;Software reengineering
Date:	2007
Issue Date:	2013-05-15T09:06:45Z (UTC)
Abstract:	One of the major obstacles in reverse engineering legacy object-oriented systems is the identification of aggregation relationships. An aggregation relationship, also called whole-part relationship, is a form of association relationship where an object is considered as a part of another object. This characteristic is mostly of semantic nature; therefore, it is difficult to distinguish aggregation from association relationships by implementation mechanism. Most reverse engineering methods for aggregation relationships are based on the lifetime dependence of an object on another object since many implementations of aggregation relationships result in such dependence. However, research literature shows that lifetime dependence is not really a primary property of the aggregation relationships. A reverse engineering approach is proposed on the basis of a primary characteristic for aggregation relationship-propagation of operations. To compare the propagation-based method with the lifetime-based method, we apply both methods to ten class libraries, collect their output, and perform statistical analysis to determine the effectiveness of the two methods. The analysis results show that the propagation-based method performs significantly better than the lifetime-based method and by combining both methods simultaneously the complete aggregation relationships can be uncovered for the class libraries in our experiment. ? 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.
Relation:	Empirical Software Engineering 12 (6) , pp. 575-592
Appears in Collections:	[Department of Computer Science and Information ] Periodical Articles

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