A Multi-Objective Refactoring Approach to Introduce Design Patterns and Fix Anti-Patterns

Refactoring is widely recognized as a crucial technique applied when evolving object-oriented software systems. Refactoring has promised, if applied well, to improve software readability, maintainability and extendibility. In general, to improve software quality, most of existing studies focus on the correction of anti-patterns or enhancing specific quality metrics. However, this may not be sufficient to make the source code easier to understand and modify. The introduction of design patterns that represent good design practices represents an efficient way improve the quality of systems; but very few works consider the use of refactoring to introduce design patterns. We propose, in this paper, an automated multiobjective refactoring recommendation approach to (1) improve design quality (as defined by software quality metrics), (2) fix anti-patterns, and (3) introduce design patterns. To evaluate our approach, we conducted a quantitative and qualitative evaluation using a benchmark composed of four open source systems. The statistical analysis of the results confirms the efficiency of our proposal compared to the state-of-the-art of refactoring approaches.

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