Extracting reusable components: A semi-automated approach for complex structures

•We assist software engineers to inspect complex systems.•We identify classes that import cyclic dependencies to candidate components.•We reduce the size of components extracted from systems to assist source code reuse.•Our approach assists so as the size of extracted components for reuse becomes manageable.•The tool implementing the proposed approach is freely available for download.

Source code comprehension depends on the source code quality and structural complexity. Software systems usually have complex structures with cyclic dependencies that make their comprehension very demanding. We present a semi-automated process that guides software engineers to untangle complex structures in order to extract reusable components. The process consists of iterative analysis in order to identify and transform the classes responsible for the structural complexity and effectively reducing candidate components' sizes. We evaluate our approach on two systems and demonstrate how the proposed approach assists the reusable component extraction.