Automated Correction of Design Rule Violations in Source Code Using Logical Abduction

Correcting design decay in source code is not a trivial task. Diagnosing and subsequently correcting inconsistencies between a software system’s code and its design rules (e.g. database queries are only allowed in the persistence layer) and coding conventions can be complex time-consuming and error-prone. Providing support for this process is therefore highly desirable but of a far greater complexity than suggesting basic corrective actions for simplistic implementation problems (like the ‘‘declare a local variable for non declared variable’’ suggested by Eclipse). This focuses on abductive reasoning approach to reduce inconsistency correction that consists of (1) a means for developers to document and verify a system’s design and coding rules (2) an abductive logic reasoner that hypothesizes possible causes of inconsistencies between the system’s code and the documented rules and (3) a library of corrective actions for each hypothesized cause (4) a rollback back mechanism to restore the previous stage.