Doug Kirk, Marc Roper, Murray Wood
The aim of this EPSRC funded (GR/S75857/01) project is to investigate, evaluate and develop techniques for automatically detecting design flaws.It is anticipated that the techniques will be primarily based on existing technologies such as clone detection and source code metrics, which will be refined and adapted to focus on specific design flaws. The outcome will be a suite of tools that may be applied to a system to highlight candidate areas for refactoring. It is not expected that the design flaws can be unequivocally detected, rather the focus will be on the identification and flagging of potential problems for subsequent consideration by an individual. The benefit of this is to significantly reduce the volume of code that has to be considered and bring only the difficult judgement decisions to the attention of the developer. This in turn has beneficial consequences on the development costs.
Technical Reports