During an object-oriented software life cycle, the software often needs reorganizing due to improvements of its design and new requirements. With this in mind, software developers try to redesign existing components with minimal modifications on the c...
During an object-oriented software life cycle, the software often needs reorganizing due to improvements of its design and new requirements. With this in mind, software developers try to redesign existing components with minimal modifications on the class hierarchy so that components can be refined and reused easily.
In this paper, we propose the Flattened Class Hierarchy that characterizes "normalization" of reorganization of class hierarchy structures. And, we also present an algorithm which transforms a given class hierarchy into the Flattened form. The flattened class hierarchy plays an important role as a bridge on the reorganization of class hierarchies to improve the quality of adaptiveness. And the flattened class hierarchy is helpful to us in a number of ways on the analysis and design phases.