Refactoring Detection based on UMLDiff Change-Facts Queries

Refactoring is an important activity in the evolutionary development of object-oriented software systems. Several IDEs today support the automated application of some refactorings; at the same time, there is substantial on-going research aimed at developing support for deciding when and how software should be refactored and for estimating the effect of the refactoring on the quality requirements of the software. On the other hand, understanding the refactorings in the evolutionary history of a software system is essential in understanding its design rationale. Yet, only very limited support exists for detecting refactorings. In this paper, we present our approach for detecting refactorings by analyzing the system evolution at the design level. We evaluate our method with case studies, examining two realistic examples of object-oriented software