Abstract
Statecharts are an important tool for specifying the behavior of reactive systems, and development tools can automatically generate object-oriented code from them. As the system is refactored, it is necessary to modify the associated statecharts as well, performing operations such as grouping or ungrouping states, extracting part of a statechart into a separate class, and merging states and transitions. Refactoring tools embedded in object-oriented development environments are making it much easier for developers to modify their programs. However, tool support for refactoring statecharts does not yet exist. As a result, developers avoid making certain changes that are too difficult to perform manually, even though design quality deteriorates.
Methodologically, statecharts were meant to enable a systems engineer to describe a complete system, which would then be refined into a concrete implementation (object-oriented or other). This process is not supported by object-oriented development environments, which force each statechart to be specified as part of a class. Automated tool support for refactoring statecharts will also make this kind of refinement possible.
This paper describes a case study that shows the usefulness of refactoring support for statecharts, and presents an initial catalog of relevant refactorings. We show that a top-down refinement process helps identify the tasks and classes in a natural way.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Harel, D.: Statecharts: A visual formalism for complex systems. Science of Computer Programming 8, 231–274 (1987)
Harel, D., Politi, M.: Modeling Reactive Systems with Statecharts: The Statemate Approach. McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York (1998)
Harel, D., Gery, E.: Executable object modeling with statecharts. IEEE Computer, 31–42 (July 1997)
Harel, D., Kugler, H.: The Rhapsody semantics of statecharts (or, on the executable core of the UML). In: Ehrig, H., Damm, W., Desel, J., Große-Rhode, M., Reif, W., Schnieder, E., Westkämper, E. (eds.) INT 2004. LNCS, vol. 3147, pp. 325–354. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Sunyé, G., Pollet, D., Le Traon, Y., Jézéquel, J.M.: Refactoring UML models. In: Gogolla, M., Kobryn, C. (eds.) UML 2001. LNCS, vol. 2185, pp. 134–148. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Mens, T.: On the use of graph transformations for model refactoring. In: Lämmel, R., Saraiva, J., Visser, J. (eds.) GTTSE 2005. LNCS, vol. 4143, pp. 219–257. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Fowler, M.: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. Addison-Wesley, Reading (2000)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Abadi, M., Feldman, Y.A. (2009). Refactoring of Statecharts. In: Feldman, Y.A., Kraft, D., Kuflik, T. (eds) Next Generation Information Technologies and Systems. NGITS 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5831. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04941-5_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04941-5_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-04940-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-04941-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)