Mendel: A Model, Metrics, and Rules to Understand Class Hierarchies. Denier, S. & Gu�h�neuc, Y. In Krikhaar, R. & L�mmel, R., editors, Proceedings of the 16<sup>th</sup> International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), pages 143–152, June, 2008. IEEE CS Press. 10 pages.
Mendel: A Model, Metrics, and Rules to Understand Class Hierarchies [pdf]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
Inheritance is an important mechanism when developing object-oriented programs with class-based programming languages: it enables subtyping, polymorphism, and code reuse. Inheritance is also known as a difficult feature to grasp and to use correctly because of its many purposes. We propose a model of inheritance to help understand class hierarchies of class-based object-oriented programs. We define metrics and rules to highlight interesting classes and behaviours with respect to inheritance. Thus, we provide the programmer with insight on how inheritance is used in a program. We illustrate our approach on \JHotDraw and validate it further on three other programs: ArgoUML, Azureus, and Log4J. We also show that our model can describe existing rules, such as micro patterns.

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