Specification, Execution, and Detection of Refactorings for Software Models

Predefined automatically applicable composite operations such as refactorings are a prerequisite for efficient software modeling. Some modeling environments provide an initial set of basic refactorings, but they hardly offer extension points for user-specified refactorings. Even if extension points exist, the introduction of new refactorings requires programming skills and deep knowledge of the respective metamodel of the used modeling language. We present EMF Modeling Operations, a Java based framework for specifying and executing composite operations within the user’s modeling language and editor of choice. The user demonstrates a composite operation on a concrete example from which a generic and executable operation specification is semi-automatically derived. Furthermore, we show how the resulting specification may be used to enable an a-posteriori detection of applications of the specified operations between two successive versions of a model, also in absence of a directly recorded change log.