Concern-based Refactorings Supported by Class Models to Reengineer Object-Oriented Software into Aspect-Oriented Ones

Abstract

Reengineering Object-Oriented Software (OO) into Aspect-Oriented Software (AO) is a challenging task, mainly when it is done by means of refactorings in the code-level. The reason for it is that direct transformations from OO code to AO one involve several design decisions due to syntactic and semantic differences of both paradigms. To make this task more controlled and systematic, we can make use of concern-based refactorings supported by models. This type of refactorings concentrates on transforming broader scenarios into a set of context-dependent scenarios, rather than specific ones, as in code-level refactorings. In this paper we propose a set of concern-based refactorings that allows design decisions to be made during the reengineering process, improving the quality of the final models. Two of them are presented in more details in this paper. An example is presented to assess the applicability of the proposed refactorings. Moreover, we also present a case study, in which AO class models created based on the refactorings are compared with AO class models obtained without the aid of these refactorings. The data obtained in this case study indicated to us that the use of the proposed refactorings can improve the efficacy and productivity of a maintenance group during the process of software reengineering.