A Categorization of Classes based on the Visualization of their Internal Structure: the Class Blueprint

Lanza, MicheleMicheleLanzaDucasse, StephaneStephaneDucasse2025-01-082025-01-082001https://boris-portal.unibe.ch/handle/20.500.12422/199332The reengineering and reverse engineering of software systems is gaining importance in software industry, because the accelerated turnover in software companies creates legacy systems in a shorter period of time. Especially understanding classes is a key activity in object-oriented programming, since classes represent the primary abstractions from which applications are built. The main problem of this task is to quickly grasp the purpose of a class and its inner structure. To help the reverse engineers in their first contact with a foreign system, we propose a categorization of classes based on the visualization of their internal structure. The contributions of this paper are a novel categorization of classes and a visualization of the classes which we call the class blueprint. We have validated the categorization on several case studies, two of which we present here.en000 - Computer science, knowledge & systems500 - Science::510 - MathematicsA Categorization of Classes based on the Visualization of their Internal Structure: the Class Blueprintconference_item10.7892/boris.10458410.1145/504282.504304