Revisiting the Delta IC approach to component recovery

Component recovery supports program understanding, architecture recovery and reuse. Among the best known techniques for detection of reusable objects (related global variables and their accessor functions) is Delta-IC (Canfora et al., 1996). This paper re-visits the original approach and extends it in different ways. It describes a variant of Delta-IC suitable for reverse engineering that omits the slicing step of the original approach. The underlying metric of Delta-IC is extended toward types integrating ideas of the Internal Access technique (Yeh et al., 1995) such that abstract data types can also be detected. Furthermore, the connectivity metric of Delta-IC is combined with a cohesion metric based on vertex connectivity. The new metrics and the new algorithm for reverse engineering are quantitatively evaluated using the framework proposed in (Koschke and Eisenbarth, 2000) as a standard evaluation of clustering techniques for component recovery