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The Australasian Journal of Information Systems

Document Type

Research Article

Abstract

Inheritance is one of the most common features of object oriented languages, and has been widely applied to develop large and complex software system. However, designing a suitable inheritance hierarchy, involving redundant inheritance, is a difficult task and easily suffers from name-confliction and repeated inheritance which are error-prone and difficult to test. In this paper, we explain how redundant inheritance makes object-oriented programs difficult to test and maintain, and we give a concrete example of the problems that arise. We show that the difficulty lies in the fact that we lack an effective detection tool suited for work with inheritance problems. Therefore, a formal checking mechanism is proposed to detect and resolve redundant inheritance. Furthermore, this checking mechanism can be easily incorporated with object-oriented CASE tool to enhance software quality.

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