Suk Hyung Hwang, Hae Sool Yang, Jung Ho Park

The KIPS Transactions:PartD, Vol. 8, No. 6, pp. 853-860, Dec. 2001
10.3745/KIPSTD.2001.8.6.853,   PDF Download:

Abstract

In the object-oriented software development, redesigning of classes and reorganizing of class hierarchy structures should be necessary to reduce many of the headaches of object-oriented software design and maintenance. To support this task, in this paper, we propose a theoretical foundation for class hierarchy reorganizations that is relatively complete, correct, formal and easy to understand and use. We introduce the flattened class hierarchy that characterizes the class hierarchy structures in object-oriented software evolution. And we also present an algorithm which transforms a given class hierarchy into the normalized form. The flattened class hierarchy helps us map the inheritance and aggregation paths in a class hierarchy to paths in an object hierarchy that is an instance of the class hierarchy. By applying the algorithm into a given class hierarchy, we can make a new, object-preserved, and flattened class hierarchy that is the cornerstone for reorganization of class hierarchy structure and plays an important role as a bridge on the incremental evolutionary changes and reuse of object-oriented software to reorganize class hierarchies.

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