Tool support for systematic class identification in object-oriented software architectures

Abstract

Sofrware architectures have received considerable attention in both research and practice for representing system stakeholder concerns, and many researchers have leveraged objectoriented models and methods for sofiare architecture representation and evaluation. While the benefits associated with object-oriented approaches are closely aligned with desirable qualities for sofrware architectures (e.g., reusability, extensibility, comprehensibility, performance), these beneJits are only realized through rational decision-making by the analyst when identihing object-oriented classes from a requirements specification. Traditionally, the class identification process has been somewhat subjective, with dvferent analysts often arriving at completely different class models from the same requirements specijkation. Since this subjectivity does not lend itself to automation, little tool support is available for identgfying object-oriented classes and their relationships. This paper describes a tool under development, Reference Architecture Representation Environment (RARE,), designed to systematically guide the analyst through class identification by applying heuristics associated with quality attributes and evaluating the resulting architecture based on relevant static metrics. RARE helps address a number of challenges typically faced during the class identification process, including (I) developing an architecture that reflects the quality attributes prioritized by the analyst, (2) managing inherent conflicts between selected attributes, and (3) capturing analyst expertise and rationale for use by others.

An Event-Based Methodology to Generate Class Diagrams and its Empirical Evaluation

“…After an exhaustive survey of tools and techniques of requirement analysis, we have found to the best of our knowledge that none of the existing approaches or tools have neither focuses on requirements analysis of event based systems nor have used events as basis for requirement analysis and conceptual modeling. Approaches are largely based either on natural language (Abbott, 1983;Jacobson et al, 1999;Turk and Vanier, 1993;Coad and Yourdon, 1990;Shlaer and Mellor, 1998;Ross, 1988;Song et al, 2005;Ilieva and Ormandjieva, 2005;Mustafa and Awofala, 2004) for which various tools have also been developed (Becker et al, 2000;Barber and Graser, 2000;Harmain and Gaizauskas, 2003;Overmyer et al, 2001;Wahono and Far, 2002;Drake et al, 1993;Perez-Gonzalez et al, 2005) or on Use cases (Anda and Sjberg, 2003;Liang, 2003;Liu et al, 2003;Roussev, 2003). NLP based techniques have their own limitations and at the same time Use Cases have been critically reviewed in the recent past (Some, 2005;2007b;Wiegers, 2005;Ferg, 2003;Samarasinghe and Some, 2005).…”

“…Several authors have used the techniques described above to develop automation support for the analysts. Some of the popular tools are A Methodology for Automatic Object Identification from System Specification (MOSYS) (Becker et al, 2000), Reference Architecture Representation Environment (RARE) (Barber and Graser, 2000), Class Model Builder (CM-Builder) (Harmain and Gaizauskas, 2003), Linguistic assistant for Domain Analysis (LIDA) (Overmyer et al, 2001), OOExpert (Wahono and Far, 2002), Automated User Requirements Acquisition (AURA) (Drake et al, 1993), A Graphic Object Oriented Analysis Laboratory (GOOAL) (Perez-Gonzalez and Kalita, 2002;Perez-Gonzalez et al, 2005).…”

An experimental study of two graph analysis based component capture methods for object-oriented systems

“…Based on the partition, two edge density metrics can be defined. The 3-cycle edge density and the 4-cycle edge density for edge e(u, v)∈E are defined in (1) and (2) respectively.…”

“…[3], [10], [4], [12], [17], [8], [9], [6], [2], [11], [5] and [7]) have been brought forward for fulfilling this task. In general, we can classify those methods into two categories: knowledge matching methods (such as [4], [12] and [11]) and structure analysis methods (such as [3], [17], [8], [9], [6], [5] and [7]).…”