Applying concept formation methods to object identification in procedural code

Legacy software systems present a high level of entropy combined with imprecise documentation. This makes their maintenance more difficult, more time consuming, and costlier. In order to address these issues, many organizations have been migrating their legacy systems to new technologies. In this paper, we describe a computer-supported approach aimed at supporting the migration of procedural software systems to the object-oriented (OO) technology, which supposedly fosters reusability, expandability, flexibility, encapsulation, information hiding, modularity, and maintainability. Our approach relies heavily on the automatic formation of concepts based on information extracted directly from code to identify objects. The approach tends, thus, to minimize the need for domain application experts. We also propose rules for the identification of OO methods from routines. A well known and self-contained example is used to illustrate the approach. We have applied the approach on medium/large procedural software systems, and the results show that the approach is able to find objects and to identify their methods from procedures and functions.