EXTRACTOR: An extensible framework for identifying Aspect-Oriented refactoring opportunities

Automatic refactoring techniques guarantee the correctness and effectiveness for the transformation of legacy software systems. Existing techniques are not effective to identify refactoring opportunities because of the complexity of composite refactoring and the behavior preservation for Aspect-Oriented refactoring. To address these challenges, we design EXTRACTOR, which is an extensible framework to identify Aspect-Oriented refactoring opportunities. In the framework, the bad smell detector provides significant query ability to detect bad smells, while the template manager enables the customization of bad smell and composite refactoring. Then refactoring opportunities are identified using logic transformation managed by EXTRACTOR Constructor. All these functionalities are based on the logic query engine, which manages the logic representation of programs. Finally we illustrate the effectiveness of the framework using case study.