Software Refactoring Process to Accommodate User-Interface Adaptivity in Existing Applications

Adaptive user-interfaces are capable of: (a) composing themselves at runtime according to a given deployment profile typically encompassing user and usage-context information and (b) possibly dropping user-interface components and activate better alternatives in their place in response to dynamic profile modifications. While adaptive behavior increasingly gains interest for a wide range of software products and services, its support is very demanding requiring adoption of user-interface architectural patterns from the very early software design phases. While previous research addressed the issue of engineering adaptive interactive applications right from scratch, there is an important methodological gap as we lack processes for the systematic evolution of existing non-adaptive applications to adaptive ones. We present a stepwise transformation process of the user-interface source code by incrementally upgrading all relevant implementation structures towards user-interface adaptivity. Because all transformation actions have been chosen to be standard refactorings the conduct of the process is well-defined while adoption preserves the original application architecture and quality of the source code.