Quality-oriented Move Method Refactoring

Restructuring is an important activity to improve software internal structure. Even though there are many restructuring approaches, very few consider the refactoring impact on the software quality. In this paper, we propose an semiautomatic software restructuring approach based on quality attributes. We rely on the measurements of the Quality Model for Object Oriented Design (QMOOD) to recommend Move Method refactorings that improve software quality. In a nutshell, given a software system S, our approach recommends a sequence of refactorings R1, R2, . . . , Rn that result in system versions S1, S2, . . . , Sn, where quality(Si+1) > quality(Si). We empirically calibrated our approach to find the best criteria to measure the improvement of quality. In our preliminary evaluation on three open-source systems, our approach achieved an average recall of 57%.