Class Structure Graphs for Object-Oriented Design and Implementation
M. Richter · 1995
For software engineers, reuse in object-oriented software development requires understanding of software components written by others. At the same time it requires design of components to be reused by others. This is the reason why object-oriented software development depends on tools that support the understanding, design and reuse of software components. As a step towards such support, we introduce an approach that uses a language independent representation taking the form of graphs of objectoriented source code. Using this representation, the object-oriented design can be conducted from an abstract level to the detailed level of implementation. In turn, existing implementations can be analysed on different levels of abstraction in order to gain better understanding of a class's structure as a basis for proper reuse. If object-oriented systems can be represented as graphs, it is possible to use graph grammars as a formal means for providing class definitions with reuse guidelines and...