Abstract

During object-oriented (OO) software development, the problem domain is mapped into the solution space implemented by a programming language and executed by a computer system. During OO design, the real-world objects are mapped into software objects with assigned responsibilities to fulfill certain tasks. In order to improve the quality of software systems, a number of approaches have been proposed to improve the quality of the existing code. One of these is "restructuring", a process of improving the internal structure of a software system without altering its external behaviour. However, refining implements artifacts tends to be much more expensive than refining design artifacts. In addition, Model Driven Architecture (MDA) with its supporting tools has become the mainstream in software development and provides increasingly powerful facilities to automatically generate documentation and code from the platform-independent design model. These facts make the quality of a software product greatly associated with the quality of the design model. In recent years, there is a trend of addressing restructuring at a higher level of abstraction. In MDA, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) model is widely used to build and visualize the design in a platform-independent way. In this dissertation, we propose the development of approaches to obtain comprehension, and perform restructuring of the UML design model.