You are kindly invited to the public defense of my PhD thesis " High-Level Views in Object-Oriented Systems using Formal Concept Analysis " that will take place on Friday, January 14th, 2005 at 16:30 at the room IWI 001 in Engehaldenstrasse 8 (Bern)

After the defense, we will share an apero at the Cafeteria in the building S14 in Schutzenmattstrasse 14 (Bern).

Best Regards,

Gabriela Arevalo

PhD Thesis Title: "High-Level Views in Object-Oriented Systems using Formal Concept Analysis"

Abstract: Within object-oriented systems there are different meaningful dependencies between different objects. These dependencies reveal contracts, collaborations and relationships between classes, methods, packages and any development unit in the systems. In most of the cases, these dependencies are not explicit in the code. This problem is due to inadequate or out-of-date documentation and mechanisms such as dynamic binding, inheritance and polymorphism that obscure the presence of existing dependencies.

These dependencies play an important part in implicit contracts between the various software artifacts of the system. It is therefore essential that a developer, who has to make changes or extensions to an object-oriented system, understands the dependencies among the classes. Lack of understanding increases the risk that seemingly innocuous changes break the implicit existing contracts in the system. In short, implicit, undocumented dependencies lead to fragile systems that are difficult to extend or modify correctly.

In this thesis we develop an approach based on a methodology and a tool support to recover this implicit information and generate high-level views of a system at different abstraction levels, using a formal clustering technique called Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). With these views, we help to build the first mental model of a system. Thus the implicit or lost information is made explicit and we are able to find uses of coding styles, possible bottlenecks and weakpoints of a system, identify eventual contracts between the entities, patterns based on the dependencies and if possible propose possible solutions to correct problems in the code. With this approach we also evaluate which are the advantages and disadvantages of using a clustering technique in software reverse engineering.

------------------------------------------------------------------------ " The intelligence of his heart had taught him the uselessness of the glory " El General en su Laberinto - Garcia Marquez ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gabriela Beatriz Arevalo Institut fur Informatik und angewandte Mathematik Gruppe Software Composition Neubrueckstrasse 10 - 3012 - Bern TE: +41 31 631 4868 (Raum: 106) Fax: +41 31 631 3355 email: arevalo@iam.unibe.ch http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~arevalo/

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