Refactoring is the process of gradually improving the design of existing code by performing behaviour-preserving program transformations. It can be done manually but most of the refactorings require tedious, error-prone manipulation of the code. Therefore, development environments now provide an automated support for applying them, for instance for renaming, extracting a method, extracting an interface, and so on.

Yet, implementing such source-to-source transformations is complex and even the most sophisticated IDEs contain bugs in their refactorings support.

In the Programming Tools Group, we aim at improving refactoring tools, by

• enabling the automation of complex refactorings,
• proving the behaviour-preserving nature of refactorings, and
• allowing developers or tool authors to easily and correclty implement their own refactorings.

Projects

• Aspect Refactoring Tools: ART
• A scripting language for refactoring: JunGL
• Refactoring via slicing: Nate

External resources

• Danny Dig's refactoring page
• Martin Fowler's catalog of refactorings

Contacts

Max Schaefer, Torbjörn Ekman , Mathieu Verbaere and Oege de Moor