A biting-down approach to hierarchical decomposition of object-oriented systems based on structure analysis

  • Authors:

  • Lu Zhang;Jing Luo;He Li;Jiasu Sun;Hong Mei

  • Affiliations:

  • Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education, Institute of Software, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, Pe ...;Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education, Institute of Software, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, Pe ...;Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education, Institute of Software, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, Pe ...;Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education, Institute of Software, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, Pe ...;Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education, Institute of Software, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, Pe ...

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

System decomposition has been widely viewed as an effective means to facilitate the comprehension of complex software systems and/or capture potentially reusable components in them. In fact, various approaches to system decomposition have been intensively documented in the literature. However, during the process of system decomposition, only a few of them can also capture the target system's hierarchical organization structure, which is essential when the target system is very complex. In this paper, we present a biting-down approach to hierarchical decomposition of object-oriented systems. Compared with the previous hierarchical approaches, the distinct features of this approach are as follows. First, our approach does not rely on agglomeration, and thus can avoid some unnecessary calculations. Second, our approach does not require merging nodes when performing high-level decomposition, and thus can avoid imprecision induced by the merging. To evaluate our approach, we conducted a case study and an experimental study on our approach. The results of these studies can confirm its effectiveness and its superiority over our previous approach. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.