Automated design flaw correction in object-oriented systems

Software inevitably changes. As a consequence, we observe the phenomenon referred to as "software entropy" or "software decay": the software design continually degrades making maintenance and functional extensions overly costly if not impossible. There exist a number of approaches to identify design flaws (problem detection) and to remedy them (refactoring). There is, however, a conceptual gap between these two stages: There is no appropriate support for the automated mapping of design flaws to possible solutions. Here we propose an integrated, quality-driven and tool-supported methodology to support object-oriented software evolution. Our approach is based on the novel concept of "correction strategies". Correction strategies serve as reference descriptions that enable a human-assisted tool to plan and perform all necessary steps for the safe removal of detected design flaws, with special concern towards the targeted quality goals of the restructuring process. We briefly sketch our tool chain and illustrate our approach with the help of a medium-sized real-world case-study.