The objective of this paper is to explain the notion of fine-grain transformations (FGTs), showing how they can be used as prototypical building blocks for constructing refactorings of a design-level system description. FGT semantics are specified in terms of pre- and postconditions which, in turn, also determines the sequential dependency relationships between them. An algorithm is provided which uses sequential dependency relationships to convert an FGT-list to a set of so-called FGT-DAGs. It is shown how to compute the precondition of such ordered collections of FGTs. The paper introduces a new approach to deal with refactoring pre- and postconditions by defining them at two different levels. To give these concepts syntactical form, we rely on the Prolog formats used by an FGT-based refactoring prototype tool. An example is provided to illustrate the various concepts and to demonstrate that, because of their simplicity, well-defined pre-post semantics and their intuitive nature, FGTs provide a pragmatic basis for building refactorings.

Title

International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering

Publisher

World Scientific

Publisher Country

United States of America

Indexing

Scopus

Impact Factor

0.886

Publication Type

Both (Printed and Online)

Volume

23

Year

2013

Pages

309-339