Analysing Object-Oriented Application Frameworks Using
Concept Analysis
Gabriela Ar\'evalo and Tom Mens
Abstract. This paper proposes to use the formal technique of Concept
Analysis
to analyse how methods and classes in an object-oriented inheritance
hierarchy
are coupled by means of the inheritance and interfaces relationships.
Especially for large and complex inheritance hierarchies, we believe
that a formal
analysis of how behaviour is reused can provide insight in how the
hierarchy was built
and the different relationships among the classes. To perform this
analysis, we
use behavioural information provided by the self sends and super sends
made in
each class of the hierarchy. The proposed technique allows us to identify
weak
spots in the inheritance hierarchy that may be improved, and to serve
as
guidelines for extending or customising an object-oriented application
framework. As a
first step, this paper reports on an initial experiment with the Magnitude
hierarchy in the Smalltalk programming language.