Case study: Class diagram restructuring
This is an incremental improvement for software engineering practitioners working with UML class diagrams.
The paper tackles the problem of improving UML class diagram quality by removing attribute clones and identifying new classes that abstract shared data features, presenting a case study of an update-in-place refactoring transformation.
This case study is an update-in-place refactoring transformation on UML class diagrams. Its aim is to remove clones of attributes from a class diagram, and to identify new classes which abstract groups of classes that share common data features. It is used as one of a general collection of transformations (such as the removal of redundant inheritance, or multiple inheritance) which aim to improve the quality of a specification or design level class diagram. The transformation is a typical example of a model refactoring, and illustrates the issues involved in such transformations.