Section: Overall Objectives

Reengineering and remodularization

While applications must evolve to meet new requirements, few approaches analyze the implications of their original structure (modules, packages, classes) and their transformation to support their evolution. Our research focuses on the remodularization of object-oriented applications. Automated approaches including clustering algorithms are not satisfactory because they often ignore user inputs. Our vision is that we need better approaches to support the transformation of existing software. The reengineering challenge tackled by RMoD is formulated as follows:

How to help remodularize existing software applications?

We are developing analyses and algorithms to remodularize object-oriented applications. This is why we started studying and building tools to support the understanding of applications at the level of packages and modules. This allows us to understand the results of the analyses that we are building.

We seek to create tools to help developers perform large refactoring. How can they keep track of changes in various locations in a system while ensuring integrity of current and new code by uniformally applying new design choices.