Adaptive Refactoring Using a Core-Based Clustering Approach

摘要

Improving the software systems design through refactoring is the most important issue during the evolution of object oriented software systems. Refactoring aims at changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behavior of the code, but improves its internal structure. We have previously intoduced an original approach, named CARD (Clustering Approach for Refactorings Determination) that uses clustering for improving the class structure of a software system. In this paper we extend our approach and propose an adaptive method to cope with the evolving structure of any object oriented application. Namely, we handle here the case when new application classes are added to the software system and the current restructuring scheme must be accordingly adapted. We provide an example illustrating the efficiency of the proposed approach.