Using FCA to suggest refactorings to correct design defects

Authors:
Naouel Moha;Jihene Rezgui;Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc,;Petko Valtchev;Ghizlane El Boussaidi
Affiliations:
GEODES, Department of Informatics and Operations Research, University of Montreal, Quebec, Canada;GEODES, Department of Informatics and Operations Research, University of Montreal, Quebec, Canada;GEODES, Department of Informatics and Operations Research, University of Montreal, Quebec, Canada;GEODES, Department of Informatics and Operations Research, University of Montreal, Quebec, Canada;GEODES, Department of Informatics and Operations Research, University of Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Venue:
CLA'06 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Concept lattices and their applications
Year:
2006

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Abstract

Design defects are poor design choices resulting in a hard-to-maintain software, hence their detection and correction are key steps of a disciplined software process aimed at yielding high-quality software artifacts. While modern structure- and metric-based techniques enable precise detection of design defects, the correction of the discovered defects, e.g., by means of refactorings, remains a manual, hence error-prone, activity. As many of the refactorings amount to re-distributing class members over a (possibly extended) set of classes, formal concept analysis (FCA) has been successfully applied in the past as a formal framework for refactoring exploration. Here we propose a novel approach for defect removal in object-oriented programs that combines the effectiveness of metrics with the theoretical strength of FCA. A case study of a specific defect, the Blob, drawn from the Azureus project illustrates our approach.