Detecting model refactoring opportunities using heuristic search
Adnane Ghannem, Marouane Kessentini, Ghizlane El Boussaidi · Espace ÉTS (ETS) · 2011
Model-driven engineering (MDE) is an approach to software development where the primary focus is on models. To improve their quality, models continually evolve due, for example, to the detection of bad design practices, called design defects. Presence of these defects in a model suggests refactoring opportunities. Most of the research work that tackle the problem of detecting and correcting defects, concentrate on source code. However, detecting defects at the model level and during the design process can be of great value to designers in particular within an MDE process. In this paper, we propose an automated approach to detect model refactoring opportunities related to various types of design defects. Using Genetic Programming, our approach allows automatic generation of rules to detect defects, thus relieving the designer from a fastidious manual rule definition task. We evaluate our approach by finding three potential design defect types in two large class diagrams. For all these models, we succeed in detecting the majority of expected defects.