Slicing large programs to isolate reusable functions

The identification of reusable assets in existing systems is an important problem to be solved to spread software reuse. This paper presents a method to identify functional abstractions in existing code. Program slicing is used to isolate the external functions of a system and these are then decomposed into more elementary components by intersecting slices. The method is applied in a case study and the results obtained tend to show that it produces satisfactory results for communicationally or sequentially cohesive modules. The work described in this paper forms part of the RE² project, aiming at spreading the reuse of software through the exploration of reverse engineering and re-engineering techniques to identify, and extract reusable parts from existing systems