Clustering Based Automatic Refactorings Identification

The aim of this paper is to approach the problem of improving the design of an object oriented software system, by identifying the appropriate refactorings. It is well known that improving the quality of software systems design is an important issue during the evolution of object oriented software systems. This improvement can be achieved by refactoring the software system in order to improve its internal structure, but without altering the external behavior of the code. In this paper we introduce a hierarchical divisive clustering algorithm for automatic identification of refactorings that improve the internal structure of a software system. We evaluate our approach using JHotDraw case study and a real software system, emphasizing its advantages in comparison with existing similar approaches.