Design Migration from Procedural to Object Oriented Paradigm by Clustering Data Call Graph

Abstract

Management of legacy software and its code, generally written in procedural languages, is often costly and time-consuming. To help this management, a migration from procedural to object oriented paradigm could be a cost effective option. One approach for such migration can be based on the underlying dependency structure of the procedural source code. In this work, we propose a new heuristic algorithm that utilizes such structure for the design migration using agglomerative hierarchical clustering. The dependency structure that has been used involve functions, parameters and global data of the procedural code. Given a procedural code, the proposed approach produces candidate classes for an object oriented design. The proposed algorithm was tested against a database of procedural codes. The results obtained have been empirically validated using Jaccard similarity coefficient. It is observed that the proposed method yields 75.6% similarity with respect to the ground truth in the average case.