An Approach Using Formal Concept Analysis to Object Extraction in Legacy Code

Formal concept analysis is a well-known technique for identifying groups of objects in software with common sets of attributes. The objects can be procedures, functions, and modules. In this paper, we are proposing an approach using formal concept analysis to extract objects in a non-object oriented programs. We define an object as a set of data and its associated methods encapsulated in a class. Thus, we start with a data structure and apply a program slicing technique to extract the code from the legacy code corresponding to the data. The data and statements are then collected into an object. This research is a collaborative work in which we are trying to draw the benefit by using formal concept analysis and apply the analysis results to the field of software maintenance.

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