Automated Design Improvement by Example

The high cost of software maintenance could potentially be reduced by automatically improving the design of object-oriented programs without altering their behaviour. We have constructed a software tool capable of refactoring objectoriented programs to conform more closely to design quality models based on a set of metrics, by formulating the task as a search problem in the space of alternative designs. However, no consensus exists on a single quality model for object-oriented design, since the definition of ‘quality’ can depend on the purpose, pedigree and perception of the maintenance programmer. We therefore demonstrate here the flexibility of our approach by automatically refactoring several Java programs to conform with quality models based on the metric values of example programs. Results show that an object-oriented program can be automatically refactored to reduce its dissimilarity in terms of a set of design metrics to another program having some desirable trait, such as ease of maintenance.