Thursday at 10h30 Hafedh Mili from the Université du Quèbec à Montreal (UQAM) will give a talk on extracting functional features from Java legacy code. The talk will be held in B31 at the Inria Lille.
Summary: Typical OO applications implement several functional features that are interwoven into the same class hiererachies. In the absence of aspect-oriented techniques to develop and compose functionalities, developers resort to object-oriented design and programming idioms. Given a legacy OO application, it pays to identify existing functional features to help understand the structure of the application and potentially to extract those featues into separate software modules that can be maintained and reused individually. We are interested in the extraction and repackaging of functional features. We first characterize what we mean by functional feature, and then explore the properties that such features are likely to exhibit in a legacy application that integrates many of them. Next, we present algorithms for extracting such features, and the preliminary results we obtained. We conclude by discussing directions for future research.
