Extract Package Refactoring in ARIES

Abstract

Software evolution often leads to the degradation of software design quality. In Object-Oriented (OO) systems, this often results in packages that are hard to understand and maintain, as they group together heterogeneous classes with unrelated responsibilities. In such cases, state-of-the-art re-modularization tools solve the problem by proposing a new organization of the existing classes into packages. However, as indicated by recent empirical studies, such approaches require changing thousands of lines of code to implement the new recommended modularization. In this demo, we present the implementation of an Extract Package refactoring approach in ARIES (Automated Refactoring In EclipSe), a tool supporting refactoring operations in Eclipse. Unlike state-of-the-art approaches, ARIES automatically identifies and removes single low-cohesive packages from software systems, which represent localized design flaws in the package organization, with the aim to incrementally improve the overall quality of the software modularisation.