On Proving the Concept of an Ontology Aided Software Refactoring Tool

Through years more and more software is produced. The quality of software architecture however has an important role in systems exploitation, as it determines the maintainability and extensibility of an application. Recently more emphasis is put on quality of the design, so that new features can be added with ease. To preserve code readability and extensibility, software architecture must be refactored from time to time to cope with the modifications. Nevertheless, reviewing the whole source code is time consuming and does not return any surplus, thus it is often skipped, causing the software architecture to decay in time over several modifications and making it harder to add new functionality in the future. An automated method of recognizing "bad" code would help to solve some of the issues. In this article the authors propose a concept of a refactoring tool, which uses ontology to find "smelly" design and tackle the aforementioned problems. Several aspects of the tool are discussed - how it works and how it can be used to improve the software architecture, thus augment the quality.