Refactoring Catalog for Legacy software using C and Aspect Oriented Language

This paper explores the combination of AOP and refactoring, two techniques that deals with the problems of permanent evolution of software. AOP has evolved to deal with a large legacy of object-oriented (OO) code. Most of the work has been done in the area of refactoring the object oriented code but little with the procedural code and that too with aspect orientation. But the AO concept when applied to the procedural source code can be used to solve the existence of potential problems in the code thus improving the underlying design. The poorly designed procedural code when refactored with aspect orientation yields a better code. This paper documents a collection of novel refactorings enabling the extraction of crosscutting concerns from the procedural legacy source code. Therefore we establish a systematic approach for refactoring and then propose a refactoring catalog to deal with the procedural code that establishes a systematic approach to refactor the procedural code. To this end, we first investigate the impact of existing object-oriented refactorings such as those proposed by Fowler on procedural code. Then we propose some novel refactorings that are unique to the procedural code and the ones using the aspect concept are termed as aspect-oriented refactorings. We use AspeCt oriented C, an AOP language for C to demonstrate our approach.