International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering

Object-oriented languages support many modern programming concepts such as information hiding, inheritance, polymorphism, and dynamic binding. As a result, software systems implemented in OO languages are in general more reusable and reliable than others. Many legacy software systems, created before OO programming became popular, need to be redesigned and updated to OO programs. The process of abstracting OO designs from the procedural source code has often been done with limited assistance from program structural diagrams. Most reengineering focuses on the functionality of the original program, and the OO redesign often results in a completely new design based on the designers' understanding of the original program. Such an approach is not sufficient because it may take a significant amount of time and effort for designers to comprehend the original program. This paper presents a computer-aided semi-automatic method that abstracts OO designs from the original procedural source code. More specifically, it is a method for OO redesign based on program structural diagrams, visualization, and execution slices. We conducted a case study by applying this method to an inventory management software system. Results indicate that our method can effectively and efficiently abstract an appropriate OO design out of the original C code. In addition, some of the code from the original system can be automatically identified and reused in the new OO system.

This study aimed to design a software reuse system by case-based reasoning (CBR) in order to reuse object models in system analysis. We developed a system including the methods and procedures for reusing object models, and also proposed how to express the cases of object models by CBR. Moreover, this expressed the rules for retrieving, reusing and modifying object models in accordance with the new problems. Furthermore, this study confirmed its adequacy through applying the system for reusing object models to the real-world business cases; and verified the assumed hypotheses that are related to this system.

Controlling information flows to prevent information leakage within an application is essential. According to the maturity of object-oriented techniques, many models were developed for the control in object-oriented systems. Since objects may be dynamically instantiated during program execution, controlling information flows among objects is difficult. Our research revealed that association is useful in the control. We developed an association-based information flow control model for object-oriented systems. It precisely controls information flows among objects through associations and constraints. It also offers features such as controlling method invocation through argument sensitivity, allowing declassification, allowing purpose-oriented method invocation, and precisely controlling write access. This paper proposes the model and the implementation of the model, which is composed of the language AbFlow (association-based flow) and its supporting environment.

Different proposals exist to represent the software maintenance process. However most of them are very informal or too focussed on a specific goal. We have developed a semi-formal ontology where the main concepts, according to the literature related to software maintenance, have been described. This ontology, besides representing static aspects, also represents dynamic issues related to the management of software maintenance projects. In order to develop an ontology a suitable methodology should also be followed. REFSENO was the methodology used in this work. The ontology that this work presents is not a preliminary idea but it has already been used in software maintenance environments, such as MANTIS, which is currently working successfully.

Software reuse is an important topic due to its potential benefits in increasing product quality and decreasing cost. Although more and more people are aware that not only technical issues, but also nontechnical issues are important to the success of software reuse, people are still not certain which factors will have direct effect on the success of reuse. In this paper, we applied a causal discovery algorithm to the software reuse survey data [2]. Ensemble strategy is incorporated to locate a probable causal model structure for software reuse, and find all those factors which have direct effect on the success of reuse. Our discovery results reinforced some conclusions of Morisio et al. and found some new conclusions which might significantly improve the odds of a reuse project succeeding.