Identifying objects in a conventional procedural language: an example of data design recovery

The authors propose methodologies to aid in the design recovery of object-like features of a program written in a non-object-oriented language. Two complementary methods, based on an analysis of global data or of data types, are proposed, along with an interactive tool that would combine the two methods while using human input to guide the object identification process. The authors are constructing a prototype interactive software tool to implement these methods for the C language. The intention is to collect data on the user´s decisions and reasons for making them so that improved heuristics or knowledge-based-methods could be developed to improve the process