Dooley, Keith
(2016)
A Model Driven Approach for Refactoring
Heterogeneous Software Artefacts.
Masters thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
Abstract
Refactoring is the process of transforming a software system to improve its overall structure while
preserving its observable behaviour. Refactoring engines are normally used to perform these transformations
for efficiency and in order to avoid introducing behavioural changes into the program
due to human error. Although these engines do not verify that behaviour is preserved, it is widely
accepted that automated transformations are less likely to introduce errors in comparison to manual
refactoring. Despite the advantages provided by refactoring engines they fall foul of certain
weaknesses.
Here we hypothesise that Model Driven Engineering can be used to produce improved refactoring
engines that are less vulnerable to those weaknesses. We develop a Domain Specific Transformation
Language for defining new composite refactorings from a set of built–in primitives and
to script their application. We also develop an interpreter for the language, effectively providing
an operational semantics, in the guise of an extensible transformation framework. We evaluate our
approach with a case study examining the correlation between actual and predicted measurements
of the Coupling Between Objects metric for classes that undergo the extract class refactoring. The
results show that our approach is promising.
| Item Type: |
Thesis
(Masters)
|
| Additional Information: |
M.Sc. |
| Keywords: |
Model Driven Approach; Refactoring
Heterogeneous Software Artefacts; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Science and Engineering > Computer Science |
| Item ID: |
7528 |
| Depositing User: |
IR eTheses
|
| Date Deposited: |
19 Oct 2016 10:12 |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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