Model Refactoring in Web Applications

Refactoring has been growing in importance with recent software engineering approaches, particularly agile methodologies, which promote continuous improvement of an application´s code and design. Web applications are especially suitable for refactoring because of their rapid development and continuous evolution. Refactoring is about applying transformations that preserve program behavior. Code refactorings apply transformations to the source code while model refactorings apply to design models, both with the purpose of increasing internal qualities like maintainability and extensibility. In this paper we propose Web model refactorings as transformations that apply to the design models of a Web application. Particularly, we define refactorings on the navigation and presentation models, and present examples. Since changing these models impacts on what the user perceives, the intent of Web model refactorings is to improve external qualities like usability. They may also help to introduce Web patterns in a Web application.