High-impact Refactoring Based on Architecture Violations

Software refactoring has been identified as a key technique for the maintenance and evolution of object-oriented systems. Most interesting are high-impact refactorings, that is, refactorings that have a strong impact on the quality of the system\´s architecture. "Bad smells " and code metrics have been suggested as means for identifying refactoring needs. According to our experience these techniques are useful yet, in order to spot opportunities for high-impact refactorings, they should be complemented with the analysis of architectural violations. The subject of this report is a mid-sized Java enterprise application from the telecommunications domain whose functionality had to be radically extended We show how we combined several tools and techniques to identify\´ opportunities for high-impact refactorings, and discuss the resulting architecture, the refactoring process, tool support as well as related experiences