Revisiting the Delta IC approach to component recovery
Gerardo Canfora, J. Czeranski, R. Koschke · 2002
Component recovery supports program understanding, architecture recovery and reuse. Among the best known techniques for detection of reusable objects (related global variables and their accessor functions) is Delta-IC (Canfora et al., 1996). This paper re-visits the original approach and extends it in different ways. It describes a variant of Delta-IC suitable for reverse engineering that omits the slicing step of the original approach. The underlying metric of Delta-IC is extended toward types integrating ideas of the Internal Access technique (Yeh et al., 1995) such that abstract data types can also be detected. Furthermore, the connectivity metric of Delta-IC is combined with a cohesion metric based on vertex connectivity. The new metrics and the new algorithm for reverse engineering are quantitatively evaluated using the framework proposed in (Koschke and Eisenbarth, 2000) as a standard evaluation of clustering techniques for component recovery.