IEEA Package Dependencies Analysis and Remediation in Object - Oriented Systems

Software evolves over time with the modification, addition and removal of new classes, methods, functions, dependencies. A consequence is that behavior may not be placed in the right packages and the software modularization is broken. A good organization of classes into identifiable and collaborating packages eases the understanding, maintenance, test and evolution of software systems. We argue that maintainers lack tool support for understanding the concrete organization and for structuring packages within their context. Our claim is that the maintenance of large software modularizations needs approaches that help (i) understanding the structure at package level and assessing its quality; (ii) identifying modularity problems; and (iii) take decisions and verify the impact of these decisions. In this thesis, we propose ECOO, an approach to help reengineers identify and understand structural problems in software architectures and to support the remodularization activity. It concerns the three following research fields: • Understanding package dependency problems. We propose visualizations to highlight cyclic dependency problems at package level. • Proposing dependencies to be changed for remodularization. The approach proposes dependencies to break to make the system more modular. • Analyzing impact of change. The approach proposes a change impact analysis to try modifications before applying them on the real system. The approaches presented in this thesis have been qualitatively and quantitatively validated and results have been taken into account in the reengineering of analyzed systems. The results we obtained demonstrate the usefulness of our approach.