Decomposing God Classes at Siemens

Abstract

A group of developers at Siemens Digital Industry Division approached our team to help them restructure a large legacy system. Several problems were identified, including the presence of God classes (big classes with thousands of lines of code and hundred of methods). They had tried different approaches considering the dependencies between the classes, but none were satisfactory. Through interaction during the last three years with a lead software architect of the project, we designed a software visualization tool and an accompanying process that allows her to propose a decomposition of a God Class in a matter of one or two hours even without prior knowledge of the class (although actually implementing the decomposition in the source code could take a week of work). In this paper, we present the process that was formalized to decompose God Classes and the tool that was designed. We give details on the system itself and some of the classes that were decomposed. The presented process and visualizations have been successfully used for the last three years on a real industrial system at Siemens.