Formalizing Software Refactoring in the Distributed Environment by aedNLC Graph Grammar

Being a commonly used technique to enrich the software structure, refactoring – as well as any software changes performed every day – still lacks a good formal definition. Especially in the distributed environment there is a great need for a better mechanism allowing to avoid conflicts and properly merge the changes introduced by different developers. In this paper we continue our project of a core of distributed environment based on graph repository, which helped us to defeat and significantly decrease problems of refactoring conflicts. We focus on technical aspects of the environment and present precise description of the refactorings with the help of aedNLC graph grammar and graph transformation mechanisms. We also discuss some other properties of the graph repository including its abilities to store dynamic software description. Presented approach is based on UML notation, however it could be easily extended for any object-oriented language. The graph repository concept alone could lead to a model of a modern integrated software development environment.