A categorization of classes based on the visualization of their internal structure

The reengineering and reverse engineering of software systems is gaining importance in software industry, because the accelerated turnover in software industry, because the accelerated turnover in software companies creates legacy systems in a shorter period of time. Especially understanding classes is a key activity in object-oriented programming, since classes represent the primary abstractions from which applications are built. The main problem of this task is to quickly grasp the purpose of a class and its inner structure. To help the reverse engineers in their first contact with a foreign system, we propose a categorization of classes based on the visualization of their internal structure. The contributions of this paper are a novel categorization of classes and a visualization of the which we call the class blueprint. We have validated the categorization on several case studies, two of which we present here.