Multi-view refactoring of class and activity diagrams using a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm

Abstract

To improve the quality of software systems, one of the widely used techniques is refactoring defined as the process of improving the design of an existing system by changing its internal structure without altering the external behavior. The majority of existing refactoring work focuses mainly on the source code level. The suggestion of refactorings at the model level is more challenging due to the difficulty to evaluate: (a) the impact of the suggested refactorings applied to a diagram on other related diagrams to improve the overall system quality, (b) their feasibility, and (c) interdiagram consistency. We propose, in this paper, a novel framework that enables software designers to apply refactoring at the model level. To this end, we used a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm to find a trade-off between improving the quality of class and activity diagrams. The proposed multi-objective approach provides a multi-view for software designers to evaluate the impact of suggested refactorings applied to class diagrams on related activity diagrams in order to evaluate the overall quality, and check their feasibility and behavior preservation. The statistical evaluation performed on models extracted from four opensource systems confirms the efficiency of our approach.

Asymmetric Release Planning: Compromising Satisfaction against Dissatisfaction

“…The notion of Pareto-optimality guides searches towards solutions that can only be improved towards one criterion by compromising against another one. Aligned with the trend towards more analytics and subsequent quantitative investigations, multi-objective optimization has been recently applied to the Next Release Problem [73] [53], to software architectures [56], re-factoring [41], requirements selection [20], and model merging [40]. A more general release problem with looking at three releases ahead and having revenue and cost as optimization criteria and objectives were studied in [80].…”

A Pattern Based Method for Simplifying a BPMN Process Model

“…The task of refactoring resembles the action of searching and replacing these fragments with an optimised version. For a long time, there have been many works devoted to refactoring on varied contexts (for example centred on Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams [29], class diagrams [30] or use cases [31]) but it has been just in recent years when more proposals related to process models have appeared. In general, each work has different objectives and different refactoring premises (quality in terms of the number of elements, ease of understanding, consistency with changes, etc.).…”

“…The replacement operation involves simple modifications on the BPMN model, actually, just adjusting or deleting some BPMN elements. The reader can see on the Listing 2 the Java code responsible for the replacement of pattern A (lines [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36].…”

A metamodel for the specification and verification of model refactoring actions

“…the behavioral one). Mansoor et al have presented an example that intends to address this issue [15], as they have proposed a solution for maintaining intra-view conformance. In this direction, our approach provides a solution in which we can verify the feasibility of the sequence by evaluating the postcondition of a refactoring sequence.…”