CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2009/wiki1a 9 mk

Research in Refactoring Tools

Refactoring

Refactoring is the process of modifying existing source codebase in a structured and incremental way while preserving its external behavior. This process preserves the functionality of the program without introducing new bugs. Refactoring also promotes reuse of the existing codebase for other purposes thus increasing code reusability.

Overview

The fundamental work is primarily focused on the definitions and mechanism of refactoring, and proving their correctness. Refactoring means that the behaviour/functionality of the program does not change and therefore any program which meets its specifications before refactoring will continue to meet those specifications even afterwards. Refactoring can be done on any codebase and it is a general set of operations. Hence it comes with preconditions which specifies under what circumstances refactoring can be performed, also with the conformation that the dependency graphs are unchanged even after the refactoring is performed.

Current Automated Refactoring Tools

Features of some Refactoring Tools

Refactoring tools can be grouped into three broad categories.

1.Changing the name and physical organization of code, including renaming fields, variables, classes, and interfaces, and moving packages and classes.

2.Changing the logical organization of code at the class level, including turning anonymous classes into nested classes, turning nested classes into top-level classes, creating interfaces from concrete classes, and moving methods or fields from a class to a subclass or superclass.

3.Changing the code within a class, including turning local variables into class fields, turning selected code in a method into a separate method, and generating getter and setter methods for fields.