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Software refactoring has been extensively used to rectify the design flaws and improve software quality without affecting its observable behaviors. For a given code smell, it is common that there exist multiple refactoring solutions. However, it is challenging for developers to select the best one from such potential solutions. Consequently, a number of approaches have been proposed to facilitate the selection. Such approaches compare and select among alternative refactoring solutions based on their impact on metrics of source code. However, their impact on the traceability between source code and requirements is ignored although the importance of such traceability has been well recognized. To this end, we select among alternative refactoring solutions according to how they improve the traceability as well as source code design. To quantify the quality of traceability and source code design we leverage the use of …