An Empirical Comparison of Methods for Reengineering Procedural Software Systems to Object-Oriented Systems

  • Authors:

  • William B. Frakes;Gregory Kulczycki;Natasha Moodliar

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Science Department, Virginia Tech, Falls Church, USA 22043;Computer Science Department, Virginia Tech, Falls Church, USA 22043;Computer Science Department, Virginia Tech, Falls Church, USA 22043

  • Venue:
  • ICSR '08 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Software Reuse: High Confidence Software Reuse in Large Systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This study empirically compared two methods for reengineering a procedural system to an object-oriented system. Our hypothesis was that it is possible to support this process with a repeatable method. The first method was manual and was used as a baseline for evaluating the second method, which was repeatable and based on analysis of procedure coupling. The repeatable method was found to be effective for identifying objects. It produced code that was much smaller, more efficient, and passed more regression tests than the manual method. Analysis of object-oriented metrics indicated both simpler code and less variability among classes. Particularly striking was the order of magnitude difference between the average cohesion metric (LCOM) for the manual and repeatable methods.