Strengthen and Support the Maintenance of Object-Oriented Software

<body> <table width="100%"> <tr> <td align="center"> This page requires frames. <a href="http://dl.acs.org.au/index.php/ajis/article/viewArticle/286">Click here</a> for the non-frames version. <p>Non-frames version <a href="http://dl.acs.org.au/index.php/ajis/article/viewArticle/286">available</a>.</p> </td> </tr> </table> <h1>Strengthen and Support the Maintenance of Object-Oriented Software</h1> <h2><i>Ming-Chi Lee, Timothy Shih, Teh-Sheng Huang</i></h2> <h3>Australasian Journal of Information Systems</h3> <h4>Abstract</h4> <div>Inheritance is one of the most common features of object oriented languages, and has been widely applied to develop large and complex software system. However, designing a suitable inheritance hierarchy, involving redundant inheritance, is a difficult task and easily suffers from name-confliction and repeated inheritance which are error-prone and difficult to test. In this paper, we explain how redundant inheritance makes object-oriented programs difficult to test and maintain, and we give a concrete example of the problems that arise. We show that the difficulty lies in the fact that we lack an effective detection tool suited for work with inheritance problems. Therefore, a formal checking mechanism is proposed to detect and resolve redundant inheritance. Furthermore, this checking mechanism can be easily incorporated with object-oriented CASE tool to enhance software quality.</div> </body>