Membership and Participation in Object Oriented and Procedural Paradigms

Analyzing technical debt (TD) periodically with software tools is an important activity to help mitigate maintenance issues and sustain high levels of quality in software. Software written in Object Oriented languages (OO) have more dedicated TD analysis tools than software written in Procedural languages (PL) since many of the analysis techniques describe metrics that implicitly use a method's membership to a class in their calculations. The research described in this paper provides the conceptual foundation for using a membership matrix (used in current TD analysis techniques) and a participation matrix in TD analysis. Our early-stage research work proposes the participation matrix as a superset of the membership matrix and defines the mathematical requirements that must be met by a participation matrix constructed by any procedure. The participation matrix is defined as a fuzzy estimate of memberships and can be used to leverage TD analysis designed for OO to analyze PL programs. The operational implications of this work can allow practitioners to significantly benefit from improved TD tools that are also available in PL software.