Comparison of abstract data type and abstract state encapsulation detection techniques for architectural understanding

In the context of the authors' research on architectural feature recovery, abstract data type (ADT) and abstract state encapsulation (ASE, also called abstract object) have been identified as two of the smallest components which are useful to build a significant architectural overview of the system. The authors have named these the atomic components of an architecture. The paper compares five published techniques which extract ADT and ASE from source code. A prototype tool implementing each technique has been developed and applied to three medium-size systems written in C (each over 30 Kloc). The results from each approach are compared with the atomic components identified by hand by a group of software engineers. These people did not know the automatic techniques which were going to be applied to the systems.