Reverse Engineering Method Stereotypes

Abstract

An approach to automatically identify the stereotypes of all the methods in an entire system is presented. A taxonomy for object-oriented class method stereotypes is given that unifies and extends the existing literature to address gaps and deficiencies. Based on this taxonomy, a set of definitions is given and method stereotypes are reverse engineered using lightweight static program analysis. Classification is done solely by programming language structures and idioms, in this case C++. The approach is used to automatically re-document each method by annotating the original source code with the stereotype information. A demonstration of the accuracy and scalability of the approach is given