A method to re-organize legacy systems via concept analysis

This paper proposes a method to restructure the architectural source code files organization. The method exploits concept analysis and is based on the extraction of compiling, linking and inclusion dependencies. The method was applied to public domain and freely available software systems developed with C programming language. Results presented and discussed in the paper are encouraging: the method was always able to identify, for each executable (i.e., main), all the other required modules to successfully compile a working system. Moreover the candidate libraries retrieved by the method almost always match those created by developers. Finally, the directories organization was judged very effective even if different from the original one.