Model Checking to Improve Precision of Design Pattern Instances Identification in OO Systems

In the last two decades some methods and tools have been proposed to identify the Design Pattern (DP) instances implemented in an existing Object Oriented (OO) software system. This allows to know which OO components are involved in each DP instance. Such a knowledge is useful to better understand the system thus reducing the effort to modify and evolve it. The results obtained by the existing methods and tools can suffer a lack of completeness or precision due to the presence of false positive/negative. Model Checking (MC) algorithms can be used to improve the precision of DP's instances detected by a tool by automatically refining the results it produces. In this paper a MC based technique is defined and applied to the results of an existing DPs mining tool, called Design Pattern Finder (DPF), to improve the precision by verifying automatically the DPs instances it detects. To verify and assess the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed technique, we carried out a case study where it was applied on some open source OO systems. The results showed that the proposed technique allowed to improve the precision of the DPs instances detected by the DPF tool

Software Model for Impact Analysis: a Validation Experiment

Impact analysis is the process of identifying software work-products that may be affected by proposed changes. This requires a software representation model that can formalize the knowledge about the various dependencies between work-products.This study was carried out with the aim of objectively assessing whether the effectiveness of an impact analysis approach depends on the software dependency model employed. ANALYST, a tool for impact analysis, was used to implement different impact analysis approaches. The results show that the nature of the components and the traceability relationships employed for impact analysis influence the effectiveness of the approach, but different traceability models affect the various aspects of effectiveness differently. Moreover, this influence is independent of the software development approach, but is sensitive to software quality decay

Reuse Reengineering and Validation Via Concept Assignment

The first step in a software reuse reengineering process is to analyze the structural characteristics of the existing software so as to produce software component sets, each of which is a candidate for clustering and reengineering into a reusable module. This step is founded on one or more candidature criteria and the cost of the following steps depends on their quality. The notions of completeness and adequacy as applied to candidature criteria are introduced, the need for an adequacy validation process before they are applied on a software system is outlined. An adequate validation process founded on the assignment of a concept to the candidate modules is proposed, and the results of an application of this process are described and discusse