A biting-down approach to hierarchical decomposition of object-oriented systems based on structure analysis

System decomposition has been widely viewed as an effective means to facilitate the comprehension of complex software systems and/or capture potentially reusable components in them In fact, various approaches to system decomposition have been intensively documented in the literature However, during the process of system decomposition, only a few of them can also capture the target system's hierarchical organization structure, which is essential when the target system is very complex In this paper, we present a biting down approach to hierarchical decomposition of object oriented systems Compared with the previous hierarchical approaches, the distinct features of this approach are as follows First, our approach does not rely on agglomeration, and thus can avoid some unnecessary calculation, Second, our approach does not require merging nodes when performing high level decomposition, and thus can avoid imprecision induced by the merging To evaluate our approach, we conducted a case study and an experimental study on our approach The results of these studies can confirm its effectiveness and its superiority over our previous approach Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd