Supporting OO Design Heuristics

摘要

Heuristics have long been recognised as a way to tackleproblems which are intractable because of their size or complexity.They have been used in software engineering forpurposes such as identification of favourable regions of designspace. Some heuristics in software engineering can beexpressed in high-level abstract terms while others are morespecific. Heuristics tend to be couched in terms which makethem hard to automate. In our previous work we have developedrobust semantic models of software in order to supportthe computation of metrics and the construction of visualisationswhich allow their interpretation by developers.In this paper, we show how software engineering heuristicscan be supported by a semantic model infrastructure. Examplesfrom our current work illustrate the value of combiningthe rigour of a semantic model with the human mentalmodels associated with heuristics.