The Localization Method For Refactoring Based-on Metrics And It's Tool Design

Software continuously becomes more and more difficult to understand and maintain with time elapsing. Therefore, programmers must restructure the software before losing control of it. Refactoring is a key technique to acquire software quality, which is to restructure and reorganize software without changing its external observable behaviour. However, refactormg is not applied in practice as much as might be desired. One of main deterrents is the cost of detecting candidates for refactoring and choosing the appropriate refactoring transformation operation. Though the method Frank Simon presented could overcome the deterrent in a way by introducing the theory of software metrics, it is short of formal description and argumentation for safety of refactoring, what's more the tool which supports his method exists problems such as system overhead is high, each member is easy to confused, and "bad smell" cann't be quantified and so on. To overcome these problems, a localization method for refactoring based-on metrics is proposed. Formulas of metrics, formal description for refactoring method, refactoring process model metrics-driven, and a practical applied method in real systems are presented in this paper. An automatic refactoring tool based-on our method is designed.Our work can make up the limitation of "human intuition", advance the speed of identifing part of "bad smell", improve the efficiency of some refactoring operation and refactoring safety, and can be regarded as improvement and complementarity for Simon's method.