P6 — Automating Feature-Oriented Refactoring of Legacy Applications

Abstract

A software product line (SPL) aims at creating highly configurable programs from a set of features. To reduce costs and risks, developers often take an extractive approach for creating the SPL by refactoring and decomposing one or more legacy applications into features. Therefore, the developers have to identify the feature code, i.e., classes, methods, fields, or statements associated with a certain feature. In contrast, the actual refactoring, consisting of removing code fragments and reintroducing them in feature modules, is a routine task that can be automated with a tool. We created a tool that automatically refactors tagged legacy code into an SPL. We investigated refactorings into feature modules implemented with Jak (AHEAD Tool Suite) and AspectJ.