During software development and evolution activities, the developers focus the refactoring efforts on choosing and applying refactoring patterns (or sequences of patterns) that are likely to improve the software quality. Considering the search for opportunities of refactoring sequences, the main problem is the size of the search space (there are too many possible sequences to be evaluated). We propose an approach to narrow the number of refactoring sequences by discarding those that semantically does not make sense and avoiding those that lead to the same results. We provide a detailed example of the approach considering sequences for method manipulation, showing how the number of sequences can be significantly reduced.
Requirements specification can often exhibit some shortcomings, regarding contents and organization of its partial specification elements. Sometimes, modularization is deficient, with modules dealing with too much information, or the same functionality being specified in different modules. Left unchecked, these inadequacies will propagate themselves to the subsequent phases of the software development and cause problems during maintenance. We have been able to identify a collection of typical deficiencies in the specification of structured documents and we propose a collection of refactorings that minimize or remove them. Doing this early in the development process increases requirements modularity and understandability. A case study is conducted to illustrate the use of these refactoring practices on two existing requirement documents.
In this paper, we present the birth, growth, and maturation of Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) research over the last years, with emphasis on the Brazilian AOSD community and its research contributions. These research contributions are illustrated from different perspectives: (i) an overview of the research work developed by our community in several prominent software engineering areas; (ii) a historical chronology of the community; and (iii) the growth, impact and quality of research outcomes.
Background: Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) is a paradigm that promotes advanced separation of concerns and modularity throughout the software development lifecycle, with a distinctive emphasis on modular structures that cut across traditional abstraction boundaries. In the last 15 years, research on AOSD has boosted around the world. The AOSD-BR research community (AOSD-BR stands for AOSD in Brazil) emerged in the last decade, and has provided different contributions in a variety of topics. However, despite some evidence in terms of the number and quality of its outcomes, there is no organized characterization of the AOSD-BR community that positions it against the international AOSD Research community and the Software Engineering Research community in Brazil. Aims: In this paper, our main goal is to characterize the AOSD-BR community with respect to the research developed in the last decade, confronting it with the AOSD international community and the Brazilian Software Engineering community. Method: Data collection, validation and analysis were performed in collaboration with several researchers of the AOSD-BR community. The characterization was presented from three different perspectives: (i) a historical timeline of events and main milestones achieved by the community; (ii) an overview of the research developed by the community, in terms of key challenges, open issues and related work; and (iii) an analysis on the impact of the AOSD-BR community outcomes in terms of well-known indicators, such as number of papers and number of citations. Results: Our analysis showed that the AOSD-BR community has impacted both the international AOSD Research community and the Software Engineering Research community in Brazil.
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