INES – National Institute of Science and Technology for Software Engineering

Project “Evolution and Refactoring tools”

Software changes often bring elevated costs for the development team. Since the majority of domains nowadays depend of software, it must have its operations fully synchronized with the business it automates. Examples of evolutionary activities include bug correction, addition of new functionalities or improving software quality without modifying its behavior. Refactoring, for instance, aims at improving a software project without modifying its observable behavior. Tool usage, then, becomes vital in the context of evolution tasks, since they are commonly error-prone and time consuming. Besides that, evolution costs are high, which reasons why automating its tasks has such high potential of decreasing production and adapting software costs. This may be noticed in different evolution contexts:

• Refactoring: IDEs such as Eclipse and Netbeans have useful tools for automated refactorings;

• New requirements adaption: tools for change-impact analysis;

• Bug correction: debuggers and, again, impact analysis tools.

This projects aims at contributing for improving the process of software development, especially evolution issues, emphasizing their automation through tools developed following rigorous software engineering techniques. This way, we want to enable significant productivity and quality improvements in the final software development teams result, especially preventive maintenance.

Participators: UFCG, UFPE, UFS, UPE