API-evolution support with diff-catchup

Abstract

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 refac-torings in the evolutionary history of a software system is essential in understanding its design rationale, which might be very helpful in assisting future maintenance and evolution tasks. The JDEvAn tool supports a comprehen-sive refactoring-analysis process, including the extraction of logical-design elements and relations from the system's code, the recovery of design-level changes from one version to the next, the identification of refactorings as compo-sitions of such changes, and the interactive visualization and analysis of the recovered changes. In this paper, we discuss JDEvAn' method and argue for its effectiveness with two case studies on realistic open-source object-oriented software, in the context of which we show how the recovered refactoring knowledge may be used to guide future development. Show more