2011 - 2012In the software life cycle the internal structure of the system undergoes
continuous modifications. These changes push away the source code from its
original design, often reducing its quality. In such cases refactoring techniques
can be applied to improve the design quality of the system.
Approaches existing in literature mainly exploit structural relationships present in
the source code, e.g., method calls, to support the software engineer in
identifying refactoring solutions. However, also semantic information is
embedded in the source code by the developers, e.g., the terms used in the
comments.
This research investigates about the usefulness of combining structural and
semantic information to support software refactoring. In particular, a framework
of approaches supporting different refactoring operations, i.e., Extract Class,
Move Method, Extract Package, and Move Class, is presented.
All the approaches have been empirically evaluated. Particular attention has
been devoted to evaluations conducted with software developers, to
understand if the refactoring operations suggested by the proposed
approaches are meaningful from their point of view. [edited by Author]XI n.s
