Diagnosis and semi-automatic correction of detected design inconsistencies in source code

In order to alleviate design decay, different program design documentation techniques are used for the specification and detection of design inconsistencies in code. However, these design documentation techniques do not always provide support for the diagnosis and (semi-) automatic correction of such inconsistencies. In case they do, corrective solutions are typically targeted to a reduced set of pre-defined inconsistency problems, and they are not easily customizable to new kinds of consistency checks defined by a user. In particular, they cannot infer possible corrective actions to solve new user-defined inconsistency problems. In this paper, we present a technique for the diagnosis and (semi-) automatic correction of inconsistencies in the context of an existing tool for inconsistency management: IntensiVE. Our technique uses logic abductive reasoning to infer solutions to detected user-defined inconsistencies, starting from basic composable corrective actions. A first prototype implementing our technique on top of IntensiVE is shown.