Finding refactorings via change metrics

ABSTRACT

Reverse engineering is the process of uncovering the design and the design rationale from a functioning software system. Reverse engineering is an integral part of any successful software system, because changing requirements lead to implementations that drift from their original design. In contrast to traditional reverse engineering techniques ---which analyse a single snapshot of a system--- we focus the reverse engineering effort by determining where the implementation has changed. Since changes of object-oriented software are often phrased in terms of refactorings, we propose a set of heuristics for detecting refactorings by applying lightweight, object-oriented metrics to successive versions of a software system. We validate our approach with three separate case studies of mature object-oriented software systems for which multiple versions are available. The case studies suggest that the heuristics support the reverse engineering process by focusing attention on the relevant parts of a software system.

REFERENCES

• Arno92a: Robert S. Arnold, Software Reengineering, IEEE Computer Society Press, 1992.
• Ball96a: Thomas Ball , Stephen G. Eick, Software Visualization in the Large, Computer, v.29 n.4, p.33-43, April 1996 [doi>10.1109/2.488299]
• Beck94a: Kent Beck , Ralph E. Johnson, Patterns Generate Architectures, Proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, p.139-149, July 04-08, 1994
• Bigg94a: Ted J. Biggerstaff , Bharat G. Mitbander , Dallas E. Webster, Program understanding and the concept assignment problem, Communications of the ACM, v.37 n.5, p.72-82, May 1994 [doi>10.1145/175290.175300]
• Brow96c: Kyle Brown, "Design Reverse-engineering and Automated Design Pattern Detection in Smalltalk," Ph.D. dissertation. North Carolina State University, 1996. {http://www.ksccary.com/kbrown.htm, http://hillside.net/patterns/papers/}.
• Casa92a: Eduardo Casais, An Incremental Class Reorganization Approach, Proceedings of the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, p.114-132, June 29-July 03, 1992
• Casa97a: Eduoardo Casais and Antero Taivalsaari, "Object-Oriented Software Evolution and Reengineering (Special Issue)," Journal of Theory and Practice of Object Systems (TAPOS), Vol. 3(4), 1997.
• Chid94a: S. R. Chidamber , C. F. Kemerer, A Metrics Suite for Object Oriented Design, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.20 n.6, p.476-493, June 1994 [doi>10.1109/32.295895]
• Deme99c: Serge Demeyer , Stéphane Ducasse , Michele Lanza, A Hybrid Reverse Engineering Approach Combining Metrics and Program Visualization, Proceedings of the Sixth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, p.175, October 06-08, 1999
• Deme99d: Serge Demeyer, Stephane Ducasse and Sander Tichelaar, "Why Unified is not Universal. UML Shortcomings for Coping with Round-trip Engineering," Proceedings UML'99, Bernhard Rumpe (Ed.), LNCS 1723, Springer-Verlag, Fort Collins, Colorado, 1999.
• Duca99b: Stéphane Ducasse , Matthias Rieger , Serge Demeyer, A Language Independent Approach for Detecting Duplicated Code, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, p.109, August 30-September 03, 1999
• Fent97a: Norman Fenton , Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, Software metrics (2nd ed.): a rigorous and practical approach, PWS Publishing Co., Boston, MA, 1997
• Flor97a: Gert Florijn, Marco Meijers and Pieter van Winsen, "Tool Support for Object-Oriented Patterns," Proceedings ECOOP'97, Mehmet Aksit and Satoshi Matsuoka (Ed.), LNCS 1241, Springer-Verlag, 1997.
• Fowl99a: Refactoring: improving the design of existing code, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1999
• Gold95a: Adele Goldberg , Kenneth S. Rubin, Succeeding with objects: decision frameworks for project management, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1995
• Haun95a: Jim Haungs, "A technical overview of VisualWorks 2.0," The Smalltalk Report, January 1995.
• Hend96a: Brian Henderson-Sellers, Object-oriented metrics: measures of complexity, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1995
• Hond98a: Koen De Hondt, A Novel Approach to Architectural Recovery in Evolving Object-Oriented Systems, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels -Belgium, December, 1998, Ph.D. dissertation {ftp://progftp.vub.ac.be/dissertation/}.
• Howa95a: Timothy G. Howard, Smalltalk Developer's Guide to VisualWorks, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 1995
• Jaza99a: Harald Gall , Mehdi Jazayeri , Claudio Riva, Visualizing Software Release Histories: The Use of Color and Third Dimension, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, p.99, August 30-September 03, 1999
• John92a: Ralph E. Johnson, Documenting frameworks using patterns, conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, p.63-76, October 18-22, 1992, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• John93b: Ralph E. Johnson , William F. Opdyke, Refactoring and Aggregation, Proceedings of the First JSSST International Symposium on Object Technologies for Advanced Software, p.264-278, November 04-06, 1993
• Kell99a: Rudolf K. Keller , Reinhard Schauer , Sébastien Robitaille , Patrick Pagé, Pattern-based reverse-engineering of design components, Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Software engineering, p.226-235, May 16-22, 1999, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/302405.302622]
• Kohl98a: Gerd Köhler , Heinrich Rust , Frank Simon, Assessment of Large Object Oriented Software Systems - A Metric Based Process, Workshop ion on Object-Oriented Technology, p.250-251, July 20-24, 1998
• Kont97a: K. Kontogiannis, Evaluation Experiments on the Detection of Programming Patterns Using Software Metrics, Proceedings of the Fourth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE '97), p.44, October 06-08, 1997
• Lagu97a: Bruno Lague , Daniel Proulx , Jean Mayrand , Ettore M. Merlo , John Hudepohl, Assessing the Benefits of Incorporating Function Clone Detection in a Development Process, Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance, p.314, October 01-03, 1997
• Lang95a: Danny B. Lange , Yuichi Nakamura, Interactive visualization of design patterns can help in framework understanding, Proceedings of the tenth annual conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, p.342-357, October 15-19, 1995, Austin, Texas, United States
• Lore94a: Mark Lorenz , Jeff Kidd, Object-oriented software metrics: a practical guide, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1994
• Mari98a: Radu Marinescu, Using Object-Oriented Metrics for Automatic Design Flaws Detection in Large Scale Systems, Workshop ion on Object-Oriented Technology, p.252-255, July 20-24, 1998
• Moor96a: Ivan Moore, Automatic inheritance hierarchy restructuring and method refactoring, Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.235-250, October 06-10, 1996, San Jose, California, United States
• Murp97a: Gail C. Murphy , David Notkin, Reengineering with Reflexion Models: A Case Study, Computer, v.30 n.8, p.29-36, August 1997 [doi>10.1109/2.607045]
• Opdy92b: William F. Opdyke, Refactoring object-oriented frameworks, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, 1992
• Opdy93a: William F. Opdyke , Ralph E. Johnson, Creating abstract superclasses by refactoring, Proceedings of the 1993 ACM conference on Computer science, p.66-73, February 16-18, 1993, Indianapolis, Indiana, United States [doi>10.1145/170791.170804]
• Pauw93a: Wim De Pauw , Richard Helm , Doug Kimelman , John Vlissides, Visualizing the behavior of object-oriented systems, Proceedings of the eighth annual conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, p.326-337, September 26-October 01, 1993, Washington, D.C., United States
• Rich99a: Tamar Richner , Stéphane Ducasse, Recovering High-Level Views of Object-Oriented Applications from Static and Dynamic Information, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, p.13, August 30-September 03, 1999
• Robe97a: Don Roberts , John Brant , Ralph Johnson, A refactoring tool for Smalltalk, Theory and Practice of Object Systems, v.3 n.4, p.253-263, 1997 [doi>10.1002/(SICI)1096-9942(1997)3:4<253::AID-TAPO3>3.3.CO;2-I]
• Schu98a: Benedikt Schulz , Thomas Genssler , Berthold Mohr , Walter Zimmer, On the Computer Aided Introduction of Design Pattern into Object-Oriented Systems, Proceedings of the Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems, p.258, September 22-25, 1998
• Toku99a: Lance Tokuda , Don Batory, Evolving Object-Oriented Designs with Refactorings, Proceedings of the 14th IEEE international conference on Automated software engineering, p.174, October 12-15, 1999
• Wate94a: Richard G. Waters , Elliot Chikofsky, Reverse engineering: progress along many dimensions, Communications of the ACM, v.37 n.5, p.22-25, May 1994 [doi>10.1145/175290.175291]
• Will96a: Linda Wills and Philip Newcomb, "Reverse Engineering (Special Issue)," Automated Software Engineering, Vol. 3(1-2), June 1996.
• Will96b: Linda Wills and James H. Cross, "Recent Trends and Open Issues in Reverse Engineering," Automated Software Engineering, Vol. 3(1-2), June, 1996.
• Wuyt98a: Roel Wuyts, "Class-management using Logical Queries, Application of a Reflective User Interface Builder," Proceedings TOOLS 26 - USA '98, IEEE Computer Society Press, 1998.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.7 Distribution, Maintenance, and Enhancement
          Subjects: Restructuring, reverse engineering, and reengineering

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.8 Problem Solving, Control Methods, and Search
          Subjects: Heuristic methods

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Measurement, Performance, Theory

Keywords:
metrics, object-oriented frameworks, refactoring, reverse engineering, software evolution