Detection and correction of design defects in object-oriented designs

Design defects come from poor design choices and have the effect of degrading the quality of object-oriented designs.Therefore, they present opportunities for improvements.However, design defects have not been precisely specified and there are few appropriate tools that allow their detection as well as their correction. Our goal is to provide a systematic method to specify systematically design defects precisely and to generate automatically detection and correction algorithms from their specifications. The detection algorithms are based not only on metrics but also on semantical and structural properties whereas the correction algorithms are based on refactorings. We apply and validate these algorithms on open-source object-oriented programs to show that our method allows a systematic specification, a precise detection, and a suitable correction of design defects.