A direction of migrating procedural paradigm to object based architecture by forming cluster of functions using local search heuristics

In contrast to procedural programming, object oriented design provides better modularity, manageability and extensibility. Some legacy softwares written in procedural languages phase out of upgrading and support due to an unmanageable design. This paper proposes two variations of local search based heuristic to discover clues for object oriented design from the underlying structure of procedural languages. This has the potential to help a semi-automated migration of legacy software to a new object based design. The scheme was applied on three data instances which were generated from synthetic and real life software. In terms of optimal cluster finding, results show that the proposed technique improves 24.714% and 5.66% more than Greedy and Genetic approaches respectively.