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.