Towards the Formalization of a Reusability Framework for Refactoring

As industry and academia embrace component and objectbased design models, programming languages, technologies, and tools, they are outpacing our ability to formally define models and frameworks supporting organization and domain specific reuse. For software engineers to accurately assess potential and actual reuse of software artifacts, we must transition from ad-hoc reuse to a evaluative paradigm that achieves reuse of an organization’s current and future products. Towards this goal, our previous work has provided a framework for reusability assessment of components and classes via metrics and refactoring guidelines. In this paper, we work towards the formalization of this reusability framework. Our objectives and contributions are: a set of properties for the assumptions of the reusability framework; the formalization of class coupling, class generality, and related class concepts which underlie reuse assessment and refactoring; a reusability improvement factor to capture refactoring gain (or loss); and a refactoring algorithm for improving reusability.