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University of Munich / Departement of CS(Informatik)

Alexej Kupin - Master thesis: "Design and development of program transformation tool"

This research was requested by :

University of Technology Munich/ Departement of CS(Informatik)

Special thanks to my advisors: Dipl.Inform. A.Harrer , Dipl.Inform. C.Harfinger
and mentor Prof.Dr.M.Paul


The development of computer science with its new hard- and software technologies in the past couple of years has left many people unemployed. Many of the former traditional occupations have been completely or partially replaced by computers or automated programs.

Finally the time has come that programmers develop programs, which cut the jobs for software developers!

A good example of this trend is automatic program transformation techniques (refactoring). A transformation is basically a change made automatically to the existing program. These techniques and the implementation of a prototype-tool for refactoring of programs, written in Java-language, is the object and goal of this research

Enjoy the future!

  • Research paper & documentation: Contents

  • Software download: DPT-Tool

  • Presentation(in German): DPT-Tool

  • Research(in German): DPT-Tool

    A goal of this thesis is the design and realization of a prototype-tool for
    automatic program transformations, which allows refactoring of programs
    written in Java language. The main part of this research is the refactoring
    of existing software. It explores the ideas and the ways how code changes
    can be done faster, easier and can be automated by the use of a refactoring tool.

    The focus of this work is not meant to create a huge catalog of all possible
    transformations or to prove the correctness of those transformations, but this research
    is concerned with refactorings from the potential user’s(programmer) perspective. It tries
    to select useful transformations which could really reduce the costs of the software development.

    We hope this research and the freely made availability of DPT(Design Pattern Transformer)
    as a prototype for the refactoring-tool will contribute some ideas and experience towards
    the development of commercial support for refactoring in common software developing environments
    for statically compiled languages.
    Last Modified: 15.08.2000 (c) 2000 Alexej Kupin.