Hot spot recovery in object-oriented software with inheritance and composition template methods

Abstract

The success of an object-oriented software development project highly depends on how well the designers can capture the Hot Spots of the application domain, that is, those aspects that should be kept flexible to accommodate reuse and change. Yet, all too often, Hot Spots are hardly documented and over years of software evolution, the source code that reifies them becomes increasingly entangled with the application specific code. This blurring of the flexible with the rigid parts makes an application hard to maintain, prone to unexpected change impact, and immobile for reuse in related areas. In this paper we apply SPOOL, our prototype environment for reverse engineering, to the recovery of Hot Spots in C++ software. We base the technique for Hot Spot recovery on the design concept of template methods. We present the approach and the interactive analysis capabilities of SPOOL to visualize browse, and inspect Hot Spots in both separate and contextual form. The findings are validated based on two industrial systems.