Support for architectural smell refactoring

Abstract

To preserve high quality of a project, it is necessary to perform many refactoring steps during the development and maintenance phases. Code refactoring received a great attention in the literature, often directed to the refactoring of code smells. While at the architectural level, architectural smells received less attention. One of the most common architectural smell which may affect many parts of a software application is the Cyclic Dependency smell. This position paper presents a tool prototype that suggests which path a developer could follow to remove Cyclic Dependency smells in Java applications. The tool has been developed as an extension of the Arcan tool for architectural smells detection. In this paper we describe how the tool identifies the path to follow for the refactoring of Cyclic Dependency on real projects. The tool has been thought only to suggest a possible refactoring approach which a developer could considerate to resolve Cyclic Dependency.