An Empirical Comparison of Methods for Reengineering Procedural Software Systems to Object-Oriented Systems

This study empirically compared two methods for reengineering a procedural system to an object-oriented system. Our hypothesis was that it is possible to support this process with a repeatable method. The first method was manual and was used as a baseline for evaluating the second method, which was repeatable and based on analysis of procedure coupling. The repeatable method was found to be effective for identifying objects. It produced code that was much smaller, more efficient, and passed more regression tests than the manual method. Analysis of object-oriented metrics indicated both simpler code and less variability among classes. Particularly striking was the order of magnitude difference between the average cohesion metric (LCOM) for the manual and repeatable methods.