Statecharts: A visual formalism for complex systems
Science of Computer Programming
Modeling Reactive Systems with Statecharts: The Statemate Approach
Modeling Reactive Systems with Statecharts: The Statemate Approach
«UML» '01 Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on The Unified Modeling Language, Modeling Languages, Concepts, and Tools
On the use of graph transformations for model refactoring
GTTSE'05 Proceedings of the 2005 international conference on Generative and Transformational Techniques in Software Engineering
Automatic recovery of statecharts from procedural code
Proceedings of the 27th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
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Statecharts are an important tool for specifying the behavior of reactive systems, and development tools can automatically generate object-oriented code from them. As the system is refactored, it is necessary to modify the associated statecharts as well, performing operations such as grouping or ungrouping states, extracting part of a statechart into a separate class, and merging states and transitions. Refactoring tools embedded in object-oriented development environments are making it much easier for developers to modify their programs. However, tool support for refactoring statecharts does not yet exist. As a result, developers avoid making certain changes that are too difficult to perform manually, even though design quality deteriorates. Methodologically, statecharts were meant to enable a systems engineer to describe a complete system, which would then be refined into a concrete implementation (object-oriented or other). This process is not supported by object-oriented development environments, which force each statechart to be specified as part of a class. Automated tool support for refactoring statecharts will also make this kind of refinement possible. This paper describes a case study that shows the usefulness of refactoring support for statecharts, and presents an initial catalog of relevant refactorings. We show that a top-down refinement process helps identify the tasks and classes in a natural way.