Software Complexity Reduction by Automated Refactoring Schema

Abstract

As the scale of software systems is growing rapidly, software complexity is becoming one of the main problems in software engineering. Higher complexity in software increases the potential risk and defects of software system, which makes it more difficult to analyze the correctness and improve the quality of software. In this paper, we present an automated refactoring schema to reduce the complexity of the component-based software. The main idea of our approach is to search a hierarchical software with a minimum hierarchical complexity and refactor the original software into it by reassembling several subcomponents into tightly coupled hierarchical ones. Besides, our approach can be easily adjusted to deal with some new situations, in which several types of constraints on partition of software components are given. Finally, we conduct a case study with Battery Management System (BMS) and the result demonstrates our approach can automatically and effectively reduce the structural complexity of software system.