Decoupling of collaboration-based designs

Collaboration-based design is a well known method for constructing complex software systems [l, 12, 13]. A collaboration implements one feature of the system. Because of the independent development of collaborations, collaborations might easily produce methods with identical signatures though no intention of overriding [7, 10{. This paper differentiates between accidental and intended overriding and proposes a solution to the problem generated from overriding method signatures between collaborations. Our solution is based on method renaming at the compilation level. The predominant goal is the clarity, measured by the ease-of-use by developers.