{"id":11134,"date":"2018-11-15T09:00:06","date_gmt":"2018-11-15T14:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/?p=11134"},"modified":"2024-07-08T06:05:41","modified_gmt":"2024-07-08T10:05:41","slug":"dearborn-professor-achieves-holy-grail-of-software-engineering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/2018\/11\/15\/dearborn-professor-achieves-holy-grail-of-software-engineering\/","title":{"rendered":"Dearborn professor achieves “holy grail” of software engineering"},"content":{"rendered":"
\""

Associate Professor Marouane Kessentini, third from left, with his team of student researchers. (UM-Dearborn News)<\/p><\/div>\n

Cleaning up messy legacy software is a bane of companies big and small, but it\u2019s long been considered an unclimbable mountain. Now, UM-Dearborn faculty member\u00a0Marouane Kessentini<\/strong> might have found a solution<\/a>. His software refactoring tool\u2014which helps automate the process of cleaning up messy legacy code\u2014was impressive enough that U-M\u2019s Office of Technology Transfer named if one of eight notable U-M inventions of the year. With more than 500 inventions coming out in 2018, it wasn\u2019t for lack of competition. Kessentini was also the only UM-Dearborn professor to earn a nod.<\/p>\n

The Office of Tech Transfer\u2019s Drew Bennett said Kessentini\u2019s work in the field of refactoring stands out for several reasons. For starters, his tools have broad application throughout industry, and they\u2019re already being licensed across the market. But perhaps most impressive is that up until recently, effective refactoring tools were seen simultaneously as both a \u2018holy grail\u2019 and \u2018lost cause\u2019 in the field of software engineering.<\/p>\n

“Big companies spent a ton of money on trying to solve these same kinds of issues 10 or 15 years ago. But the technology just wasn\u2019t quite there, and ultimately the tools in this area just haven\u2019t proven very effective,\u201d Bennett says. “He\u2019s definitely considered the expert in the field among his peers. And there\u2019s a real opportunity here to go from something that\u2019s a research project to a commercial project that has a broad-based impact.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cleaning up messy legacy software is a bane of companies big and small, but it\u2019s long been considered an unclimbable mountain. Now, UM-Dearborn faculty member\u00a0Marouane Kessentini might have found a solution. His software refactoring tool\u2014which helps automate the process of cleaning up messy legacy code\u2014was impressive enough that U-M\u2019s Office of Technology Transfer named if one of eight\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11137,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","_umich_oidc_access":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[175,36,130,127],"class_list":["post-11134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus-news","tag-award","tag-dearborn","tag-research","tag-software"],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/marouane_kessentini_lab-e1544124090121.jpg",546,364,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/marouane_kessentini_lab-e1544124090121-200x133.jpg",200,133,true],"medium":["https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/marouane_kessentini_lab-e1544124090121-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/marouane_kessentini_lab-e1544124090121.jpg",546,364,false],"large":["https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/marouane_kessentini_lab-e1544124090121.jpg",546,364,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/marouane_kessentini_lab-e1544124090121.jpg",546,364,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/marouane_kessentini_lab-e1544124090121.jpg",546,364,false],"excerpt-thumbnail":["https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/marouane_kessentini_lab-e1544124090121-200x140.jpg",200,140,true],"themonic-thumbnail":["https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/marouane_kessentini_lab-e1544124090121-60x42.jpg",60,42,true],"ioslider-thumbnail":["https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/marouane_kessentini_lab-e1544124090121-546x300.jpg",546,300,true],"post-thumbnail":["https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/marouane_kessentini_lab-e1544124090121.jpg",546,364,false],"400x250-crop":["https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/marouane_kessentini_lab-e1544124090121.jpg",375,250,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"News Staff","author_link":"https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/author\/mitnewsadm\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"Cleaning up messy legacy software is a bane of companies big and small, but it\u2019s long been considered an unclimbable mountain. Now, UM-Dearborn faculty member\u00a0Marouane Kessentini might have found a solution. His software refactoring tool\u2014which helps automate the process of cleaning up messy legacy code\u2014was impressive enough that U-M\u2019s Office of Technology Transfer named if…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11134"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11141,"href":"https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11134\/revisions\/11141"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}