Using FCA to Suggest Refactorings to Correct Design Defects. Moha, N., Rezgui, J., Gu�h�neuc, Y., Valtchev, P., & El Boussaidi, G. In Yahia, S. B. & Nguifo, E. M., editors, Proceedings of the 4<sup>th</sup> International Conference on Concept Lattices and their Applications (CLA), pages 297–302, September, 2006. IEEE CS Press. Short paper. 6 pages.
Using FCA to Suggest Refactorings to Correct Design Defects [pdf]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
Design defects are poor design choices resulting in a hard-to- maintain software, hence their detection and correction are key steps of a disciplined software process aimed at yielding high-quality software artifacts. While modern structure- and metric-based techniques enable precise detection of design defects, the correction of the discovered defects, e.g., by means of refactorings, remains a manual, hence error-prone, activity. As many of the refactorings amount to re-distributing class members over a (possibly extended) set of classes, formal concept analysis (FCA) has been successfully applied in the past as a formal framework for refactoring exploration. Here we propose a novel approach for defect removal in object-oriented programs that combines the effectiveness of metrics with the theoretical strength of FCA. A case study of a specific defect, the Blob, drawn from the Azureus project illustrates our approach.

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