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SET 2004 -
A software system’s structure degrades increasingly during
its lifetime and therefore it gets harder and harder to
maintain. As a result the structure needs to be reconditioned
from time to time. The problem is to change the
structure at the appropriate places, since an improvement
at one spot might lead to a degradation at another. This
paper describes a new methodology that, starting from an
initial structure, computes a behaviorally equivalent structure,
having better metric and heuristic values being used to
assess the structure’s quality. This new structure can then
be used to derive the refactorings needed to transform the
existing source code. The main idea is to treat the problem
as a search problem and to solve it using a genetic algorithm.
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