Automatically identifying reusable OO legacy code

Much object oriented code has been written without reuse in mind, making identification of useful components difficult. The Patricia (Program Analysis Tool for Reuse) system automatically identifies these components through understanding comments and identifiers. To understand a program, Patricia uses a unique heuristic approach, deriving information from the linguistic aspects of comments and identifiers and from other nonlinguistic aspects of OO code, such as a class hierarchy. In developing the Patricia system, we had to overcome the problems of syntactically parsing natural language comments and syntactically analyzing identifiers-all prior to a semantic understanding of the comments and identifiers. Another challenge was the semantic understanding phase, when the organization of the knowledge base and an inferencing scheme were developed.