Fixing Design Inconsistencies of Polymorphic Methods Using Swarm Intelligence

Background: Modern industry is heavily dependent on software. The complexity of designing and developing software is a serious engineering issue. With the growing size of software systems and increase in complexity, inconsistencies arise in software design and intelligent techniques are required to detect and fix inconsistencies. Aim: Current industrial practice of manually detecting inconsistencies is time consuming, error prone and incomplete. Inconsistencies arising as a result of polymorphic object interactions are hard to trace. We propose an approach to detect and fix inconsistencies in polymorphic method invocations in sequence models. Method: A novel intelligent approach based on self regulating particle swarm optimization to solve the inconsistency during software system design is presented. Inconsistency handling is modelled as an optimization problem that uses a maximizing fitness function. The proposed approach also identifies the changes required in the design diagrams to fix the inconsistencies. Result: The method is evaluated on different software design models involving static and dynamic polymorphism and inconsistencies are detected and resolved. Conclusion: Ensuring consistency of design is highly essential to develop quality software and solves a major design issue for practitioners. In addition, our approach helps to reduce the time and cost of developing software.