Refactoring module structure

Abstract

This paper focuses on restructuring software written in Erlang. In large software projects, it is a common problem that internal structural complexity can grow to an extent where maintenance becomes impossible. This situation can be avoided by careful design, building loosely coupled components with strictly defined interfaces. However, when these design decisions are not made in the right time, it becomes necessary to split an already working software into such components, without breaking its functionality. There is strong industrial demand for such transformations in refactoring legacy code. A refactoring tool is very useful in the execution of such a restructuring. This paper shows that the semantical analysis required for refactoring is also useful for making suggestions on clustering. Existing analysis results are used to cover the whole process of module restructuring, starting with planning the new structure, and finishing by making the necessary source code transformations.