Using Dynamic Information for the Iterative Recovery of Collaborations and Roles

Modeling object-oriented applications using collaborationsand roles is now well accepted. Collaboration-basedor role-based designs decompose an application into tasksperformed by a subset of the applications' classes. Collaborationsprovide a larger unit of understanding and reusethan classes, and are an important aid in the maintenanceand evolution of the software. This kind of design informationis lost, however, at the implementation level, making ithard to maintain and evolve an existing software application.The extraction of collaborations from code is there-forean important issue in design recovery. In this paper wepropose an iterative approach which uses dynamic informationto support the recovery and understanding of collaborations.We describe a tool we have developed to supportour approach and demonstrate its use on a case study.