A method to re-organize legacy systems via concept analysis

Abstract

Proposes a method to restructure the organization of architectural source code files. The method exploits concept analysis and is based on the extraction of compiling, linking and inclusion dependencies. The method was applied to public-domain and freely-available software systems developed with the C programming language. The results presented and discussed in this paper are encouraging: the method was always able to identify, for each executable (i.e. main module), all the other modules required to successfully compile a working system. Moreover, the candidate libraries retrieved by the method almost always match those created by developers. Finally, the directory organization was judged to be very effective, even if it was different from the original one.