An Empirical Study of a Conversion Methodology from OO-based Systems to Component-based Systems

Abstract

This paper presents a conversion methodology to generate component-based software systems from object-oriented based software systems and an experiment to demonstrate the working of the methodology. The generation process is achieved via several steps starting from a transformation of the input software codes to their related UML designs; then creating the corresponding graphs whose nodes are elements such as classes and interfaces and the edges are the relationships between those elements. A clustering technique is then used to create a component for each cluster and regenerate the codes accordingly. The framework is a platform-independent and the intermediate outputs are XML-based files. It allows the using of different thresholds to secure a best solution.