Refactoring with ordered collections of fine-grain transformations
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Date
Authors
Saadeh, Emmad I.M.
Kourie, Derrick G.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
World Scientific
Abstract
The objective of this paper is to explain the notion of fine-grain transformations (FGTs), showing how they can be used as prototypical building blocks for constructing refactorings of a design-level system description. FGT semantics are specified in terms of pre- and postconditions which, in turn, also determines the sequential dependency relationships between them. An algorithm is provided which uses sequential dependency relationships to convert an FGT-list to a set of so-called FGT-DAGs. It is shown how to compute the precondition of such ordered collections of FGTs. The paper introduces a new approach to deal with refactoring pre- and postconditions by defining them at two different levels. To give these concepts syntactical form, we rely on the Prolog formats used by an FGT-based refactoring prototype tool. An example is provided to illustrate the various concepts and to demonstrate that, because of their simplicity, well-defined pre-post semantics and their intuitive nature, FGTs provide a pragmatic basis for building refactorings.
Description
Keywords
FGT-based refactoring, FGT-enabling precondition, Refactoring, Refactoring-level precondition., Fine-grain transformations (FGTs)
Sustainable Development Goals
Citation
Saadeh, EIM & Kourie, DG 2013, 'Refactoring with ordered collections of fine-grain transformations', International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 309-339.