Codifying Structural Regularities of Object-Oriented Programs

Well-written object-oriented programs exhibit many structural regularities ranging from naming and coding conventions, through design patterns, to architectural constraints. Tools and environments that aid a software developer in constructing, understanding or modifying object-oriented programs should be able to reason about and manipulate such regularities. We codify structural regularities of object-oriented programs as predicates in a logic meta language on top of Smalltalk. These predicates can be used not only to enforce regularities in the software, but also to search the source code, detect violations against certain regularities and to generate code fragments that exhibit a certain regularity. On the basis of two case studies we illustrate how the use of such predicates supports a developer in various activities throughout the software development life-cycle.