Some thoughts on refactoring objects to aspects

The prospect of aspect-orientation receiving widespread acceptance and adoption in the near future begs the question of how to deal with a large base of object-oriented legacy code. We propose to investigate refactoring techniques for restructuring object-oriented source code so that it can leverage the mechanisms of aspect-orientation in order to become easier to adapt, extend and evolve. Our approach is to adopt an object-oriented framework in the area of workflow as a non-trivial case study. We plan to analyse its source code, develop an aspect-oriented version through the progressive use of manual refactorings, and build a catalogue of refactoring operations based on the experience gained through the process

Search-based composed refactorings

Refactorings are commonly applied to source code to improve itsstructure and maintainability. Integrated development environments(IDEs) such as Eclipse or NetBeans offer refactoring support for variousprogramming languages. Usually, the developer makes a particularselection in the source code, and chooses to apply one of the refactorings,which is then executed (with suitable pre-condition checks) by the IDE.Here, we study how we can reuse two existing refactorings toimplement a more complex refactoring, and use heuristics to derivesuitable input arguments for the new refactoring. We show that ourcombination of the Extract Method and Move Method refactoring canautomatically improve the code quality on a large Java code base

Automating the refactoring process

To decrease software maintenance cost, software development companies use static source code analysis techniques. Static analysis tools are capable of finding potential bugs, anti-patterns, coding rule violations, and they can also enforce coding style standards. Although there are several available static analyzers to choose from, they only support issue detection. The elimination of the issues is still performed manually by developers. Here, we propose a process that supports the automatic elimination of coding issues in Java. We introduce a tool that uses a third-party static analyzer as input and enables developers to automatically fix the detected issues for them. Our tool uses a special technique, called reverse AST-search, to locate source code elements in a syntax tree, just based on location information. Our tool was evaluated and tested in a two-year project with six software development companies where thousands of code smells were identified and fixed in five systems that have altogether over five million lines of code

A modular metamodel and refactoring rules to achieve software product line interoperability.

Emergent application domains, such as cyber–physical systems, edge computing or industry 4.0. present a high variability in software and hardware infrastructures. However, no single variability modeling language supports all language extensions required by these application domains (i.e., attributes, group cardinalities, clonables, complex constraints). This limitation is an open challenge that should be tackled by the software engineering field, and specifically by the software product line (SPL) community. A possible solution could be to define a completely new language, but this has a high cost in terms of adoption time and development of new tools. A more viable alternative is the definition of refactoring and specialization rules that allow interoperability between existing variability languages. However, with this approach, these rules cannot be reused across languages because each language uses a different set of modeling concepts and a different concrete syntax. Our approach relies on a modular and extensible metamodel that defines a common abstract syntax for existing variability modeling extensions. We map existing feature modeling languages in the SPL community to our common abstract syntax. Using our abstract syntax, we define refactoring rules at the language construct level that help to achieve interoperability between variability modeling languages.Work supported by the projects MEDEA RTI2018-099213-B-I00, IRIS PID2021-122812OB-I00 (co-financed by FEDER funds), Rhea P18-FR-1081 (MCI/AEI/FEDER, UE), LEIA UMA18-FEDERIA-157, and DAEMON H2020-101017109. // Funding for open access: Universidad de Málaga / CBUA

Recording and Replaying System Specific, Source Code Transformations

International audienceDuring its lifetime, a software system is under continuous maintenance to remain useful. Maintenance can be achieved in activities such as adding new features, fixing bugs, improving the system's structure, or adapting to new APIs. In such cases, developers sometimes perform sequences of code changes in a systematic way. These sequences consist of small code changes (e.g., create a class, then extract a method to this class), which are applied to groups of related code entities (e.g., some of the methods of a class). This paper presents the design and proof-of-concept implementation of a tool called MacroRecorder. This tool records a sequence of code changes, then it allows the developer to generalize this sequence in order to apply it in other code locations. In this paper, we discuss MacroRecorder's approach that is independent of both development and transformation tools. The evaluation is based on previous work on repetitive code changes related to rearchitecting. MacroRecorder was able to replay 92% of the examples, which consisted in up to seven code entities modified up to 66 times. The generation of a customizable, large-scale transformation operator has the potential to efficiently assist code maintenance

An illustrative example of refactoring object-oriented source code with aspect-oriented mechanisms

This paper describes a refactoring process that transforms a Java source code base into a functionally equivalent AspectJ source code base. The process illustrates the use of a collection of refactorings for aspect-oriented source code, covering the extraction of scattered implementation elements to aspects, the internal reorganization of the extracted aspects and the extraction of commonalities to super-aspects.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional (FEDER) - POSC/EIA/60189/200