Tool supported OCL refactoring catalogue

Abstract

The Object Constraint Language (OCL) as the primary constraint language in model-driven software development is heavily used to specify static semantics of arbitrary languages and models. Models and constraints are therefore interconnected and depend on each other. On the one hand, daily work with models enjoys a good tool support, whereas, on the other hand, mature OCL tools are not widely spread but a niche. Unfortunately, during their life-time, the complexity of models rises and so do their OCL constraints. Thus, the gap between conventional modelling and OCL tools becomes obvious. This fact demands for OCL tool support to cope with the complexity. To bridge this gap, refactoring is well-suited and mighty. In this paper we discuss existing work, present a revised catalogue of OCL-exclusive refactorings and provide an implementation. We do not consider co-refactorings of OCL constraints and their constrained models.