Refactoring Fat Interfaces Using a Genetic Algorithm

Abstract

Abstract-Recent studies have shown that the violation of the Interface Segregation Principle (ISP) is critical for maintaining and evolving software systems. Fat interfaces (i.e., interfaces violating the ISP) change more frequently and degrade the quality of the components coupled to them. According to the ISP the interfaces' design should force no client to depend on methods it does not invoke. Fat interfaces should be split into smaller interfaces exposing only the methods invoked by groups of clients. However, applying the ISP is a challenging task when fat interfaces are invoked differently by many clients.In this paper, we formulate the problem of applying the ISP as a multi-objective clustering problem and we propose a genetic algorithm to solve it. We evaluate the capability of the proposed genetic algorithm with 42,318 public Java APIs whose clients' usage has been mined from the Maven repository. The results of this study show that the genetic algorithm outperforms other search based approaches (i.e., random and simulated annealing approaches) in splitting the APIs according to the ISP.

On the use of developers’ context for automatic refactoring of software anti-patterns

“…The population size for GA is set to 100 individuals as typically used value in other refactoring works ( Romano et al, 2014 ), and the selection operator used is binary tournament. …”

Search-Based Scheduling of Experiments in Continuous Deployment

“…Search-based Software Engineering. Over the last years search techniques, and especially genetic algorithms, have become popular to tackle problems in multiple areas of software engineering, ranging from test data generation [19], software patches and bug fixes [20], refactoring [21], effort estimation [22], defect prediction [23], [24], to cloud deployment [25]. In the context of continuous experimentation, Tamburrelli and Margara [26] formulate automated A/B testing as an optimization problem.…”

Segregating feature interfaces to support software product line maintenance

“…The idea is to help developers creating a good mental model of system's organisation. The field was established by the seminal work of Mancoridis et al [19,32,33,36,43]. In this work, the authors use a hill-climbing algorithm as the primary search technique for automated software-module clustering.…”

“…Regarding the automatic modularisation of interfaces, after the introduction of the interface segregation principle [35], some studies have proposed ways of segregating feature interfaces. For instance, in a recent work, Romano et al propose a way of refactoring fat interfaces (i.e., interfaces whose clients invoke different subsets of their members) of classes of object-oriented programs using genetic algorithms [43]. We do not consider refactoring ill-defined interfaces.…”

“…Developers cope with the complexity of maintaining software systems by reasoning about interfaces [37]. The benefits of identifying and structuring interfaces in software systems have been a major focus of studies in the 80s [35,37,43], but there is a also growing interest in understanding how to tame the complexity of so-called feature interfaces in software product lines [11,23,27,41]. In the context of software product lines, the interface of a feature contains the program elements in the source code that are responsible for providing external access to other features [12,42].…”