Using Concepts Analysis for Mining Functional Features from Legacy Code

Legacy OO applications typically implement a number of functional features. In the absence of aspect-oriented development techniques to separately develop and maintain these features, they end up embodied in the same class hierarchies. That embodiement depends on the design technique used to implement them. We identified three such design techniques: a) multiple inheritance- or simulations thereof, b) delegation, and c) what we referred to as adhoc implementation. We are interested in developing techniques for identifying and isolating code fragments that implement distinct functional features. Here, we explore the use of concept analysis to detect ad-hoc implementations of features. We present the principles underlying our overall approach, a concrete method for identifying functional features in legacy code, and the results of preliminary experimentation.