Assure High Quality Code Using Refactoring and Obfuscation Techniques

Nowadays, software refactoring techniques are widely adopted to enhance the quality of software by improving its understandability, performance, as well as other quality related design attributes. On the other hand, various kinds of software obfuscation methods have been proposed to protect security-sensitive information involved in software implementations. This paper analyzes how refactoring and obfuscation use reverse transformations to improve quality and security of software code, and proposes a systematic modeling approach based on i* to support the selection of refactoring techniques and obfuscation methods under different social, environmental and operational situations. First, top-level softgoals guiding designer’s decision making are identified and analyzed; next accidental programming “bad smells” and intentional code cracker’s threats to these softgoals are identified and analyzed; then refactoring and obfuscation transformations are modeled as countermeasures for these threats; eventually their reversal relations and counteracting patterns are examined using example code segments.