Automatic inheritance hierarchy restructuring and method refactoring

Abstract

Most, object-oriented programs have imperfectly designed inheritance hierarchies and imperfectly factored methods, and these imperfections tend to increase with maintenance. Hence, even object-oriented programs are more expensive to maintain, harder to understand and larger than necessary. Automatic restructuring of inheritance hierarchies and refactoring of methods can improve the design of inheritance hierarchies, and the factoring of methods. This results in programs being smaller, having better code re-use and being more consistent. This paper describes Guru, a prototype tool for automatic inheritance hierarchy restructuring and method refactoring of Self programs. Results from realistic applications of the tool are presented.