AUTOMATIC INHERITANCE HIERARCHY RESTRUCTURING AND METHOD REFACTORING

Most object-oriented programs have imperfectly designed inheritance hi erarchies and imperfectly factored methods, and these imperfections te nd to increase with maintenance. Hence, even object-oriented programs are more expensive to maintain? harder to understand and larger than n ecessary. Automatic restructuring of inheritance hierarchies and refac toring of methods can improve the design of inheritance hierarchies, a nd the factoring of methods. This results in programs being smaller, h aving better code re-use and being more consistent. This paper describ es Guru, a prototype tool for automatic inheritance hierarchy restruct uring and method refactoring of Self programs. Results from realistic applications of the tool are presented.