Adapting collections and arrays: Another step towards the automated adaptation of object ensembles

- The challenge of overcoming signature mismatches for object data types is tackled.
- An automated transformation mechanism is provided on well-known data structures.
- The mechanism is implemented into our automated adapter generation tool Cordelia.
- Cordelia takes test cases and candidates to adapt as an input.

An important obstacle to reuse in object-oriented development is that objects or more generally components often cannot be plugged together directly due to interface mismatches. Consequently, automating the adaptation of software building blocks has been on the research agenda for quite a while. However, apart from various approaches based on (semi-)formal specifications, adaptation approaches based on test cases have only recently demonstrated that practically useable implementations of this idea are feasible. This article addresses the automated adaptation of arrays and collections in order to increase the applicability of existing test-based adaptation approaches.