A Formal Approach to Checking Consistency in Software Refactoring

In software development, refactoring is a process that improves the system internal structure without altering its external behavior. Applying design patterns, which are common reusable solutions of several kinds of problems is widely adopted. This technique, however, raises a challenging issue that after applying design patterns the software system may not preserve some certain behavioral properties. This paper proposes a new approach to checking consistency between original software system and its evolution at both design and implementation phases. First, we formalize elements of software designs and programs. Methods, based on these formalizations, are proposed for verifying the design and implementation of the system. Finally, the paper presents a case study of Adaptive Road Traffic Control system to illustrate the proposed approach in detail.