Search-based determination of refactorings for improving the class structure of object-oriented systems

  • Authors:

  • Olaf Seng;Johannes Stammel;David Burkhart

  • Affiliations:

  • FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik, Karlsruhe, Germany;FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik, Karlsruhe, Germany;FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik, Karlsruhe, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 8th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

A software system's structure degrades over time, a phenomenon that is known as software decay or design drift. Since the quality of the structure has major impact on the maintainability of a system, the structure has to be reconditioned from time to time. Even if recent advances in the fields of automated detection of bad smells and refactorings have made life easier for software engineers, this is still a very complex and resource consuming task.Search-based approaches have turned out to be helpful in aiding a software engineer to improve the subsystem structure of a software system. In this paper we show that such techniques are also applicable when reconditioning the class structure of a system. We describe a novel search-based approach that assists a software engineer who has to perform this task by suggesting a list of refactorings. Our approach uses an evolutionary algorithm and simulated refactorings that do not change the system's externally visible behavior. The approach is evaluated using the open-source case study JHotDraw.