Evaluating software refactoring tool support

Speaker: Erica Glynn

When: 10:00, Friday, 7 April 2006

Venue: 78-420

Up to 75% of the costs associated with the development of software systems occurs post-deployment during maintenance and evolution. Software refactoring is defined as internal modification of source code to improve system quality, without change to observable behaviour, and reduces costs associated with evolution. Tool support for software refactoring attempts to further reduce evolution costs by automating manual, error-prone and tedious tasks. Although the process of refactoring is well-defined, tools supporting refactoring do not adhere to or support the full process. Existing tools suffer from issues associated with: the level of automation, the stages of the refactoring process supported and/or automated, the subset of refactorings that can be applied, and complexity of the supported refactorings. This paper presents a framework for evaluating software refactoring tool support based on the DESMET method. For the DESMET application, a functional analysis of the requirements for supporting software refactoring is used in conjunction with a qualitative case study. This application has been completed to assess the support provided by the six refactoring tools and the efficacy of the feature set and DESMET method for evaluating refactoring tools.

Hospitality: Larissa Meinicke

Contact: Phil Cook (SSE seminar co-ordinator) (philc@itee.uq.edu.au)

SSE seminar web page: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~sse/Seminars.html