Practical Automated Assistance for Program Restructuring

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The goal of this project is to improve the current technology of semantically-driven global program restructuring, enabling its practical application in reducing software maintenance costs. Software maintenance is disproportionately costly, and it has been observed that structural degradation is the primary, but unavoidable, cause. The only alternatives are to reimplement the system or to restructure it. Restructuring is the more attractive approach, though it is a complex activity requiring tool assistance to manage consistency of changes dispersed through the program text. Recently, methods have been developed for tool-assisted restructuring, and a prototype has been built and tested. However, the current methods do not fully address module-level restructuring or performance issues of interactively manipulating semantic information. To make these techniques practical, this project endeavors to design and implement global module transformations, increase the speed of the tool by incrementally updating data structures, and enhance the restructuring tool with structural analysis tools and a visual front- end to support higher-level transformations. The results are expected to be natural adaptations of existing results in restructuring, compilers, programming environments, and program understanding. The result of the research will be a tool employing these techniques, allowing high-level interactive restructuring of programs, and showing that structure is not an inherent barrier to software maintenance.