Reusable Function Discovery by Call-Graph Analysis

Abstract

Nowadays, one of the IT challenges faced by many enterprises is the maintenance of their legacy system and migration of those systems to modern and flexible platform. In this paper, we study the network properties of software call graphs, and utilize the network theories to understand the business logic of legacy system. The call graphs turn out approximately scale-free and small world network properties. This finding provides new insight to understand the business logic of legacy system: the methods in a program can be naturedly partitioned into the business methods group and supportive methods group. Moreover, the result is also very helpful in reusing valuable functionality and identifying what services should be to expose in the migration from legacy to modern SOA context.