Generation of high level views in reverse engineering using formal concept analysis

Object oriented systems are hard to comprehend because of different dependencies existing at different stages in the system. Inferring these dependencies among the components of object oriented systems is an essential requirement before performing any modifications in the system. So the maintenance of object oriented systems is a difficult process for software maintainers in software re-engineering. Here we present an approach for finding these dependencies by applying the conceptual clustering technique known as Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). In this paper, we show the results which are obtained by applying the approach. We generate the formal concepts and views at two different stages namely class and class hierarchy which shows different dependencies existed in the Java systems. Finally we present the experimental results of three Java applications on which we have tested our proposed approach.