Conceptual Analysis of Software Structure.
Richard Cole, Thomas Tilley · 2003
Software systems are often highly structured, consisting of artifacts: types, methods, variables, and packages; and relationships between these artifacts. Domain and meta models, and software design documentation provide additional artifacts such as roles, associations, use cases, and paragraphs of text. This paper outlines a tool for software structure understanding. The tool consists of a knowledge base containing software artifacts, relationships between artifacts, and rules for generating new relationships. The knowledge base is then explored using formal concept analysis (FCA). We shall refer to the method of exploring software structure via a knowledge base and FCA as Conceptual Analysis of Software Structure (CASS). Exploration of