Abordagem para avaliar e detectar pontos de inserção e aplicação de padrões de projeto em código-fonte

Abstract

Refactoring processes are executed in order to improve a given source code in terms of quality aspects such as maintainability, flexibility, readability, and others. Several methods and tools were proposed in the literature to perform source code refactorings. It was noticed In the literature that the researches only apply their own refactoring process, the tools developed by them present just a few interactions with the user or no interaction at all and, there is no concern of assessing the benefits of applying a given design pattern in the source code. That is why this work has created an approach for detecting design patterns insertion spots and applying them. This approach puts some refactoring methods of the literature in the same environment, besides providing assessments of the real benefits of inserting a given pattern before actually applying it. The assessment of the source code is created based on software metrics related to quality attributes like maintainability, reliability, and reusability. The evaluation of the approach was initially performed by applying test scenarios described in literature methods, after that, fifty open-source projects were retrieved from the web in order to test the proposed approach. As a result, the approach was able to suggest refactoring candidates of different refactoring methods, it also presents the assessment of the refactoring candidate to the user, in terms of metrics and quality attributes.