Specifying and implementing refactorings

Modern IDEs for object-oriented languages like Java provide support for a basic set of simple automated refactorings whose behaviour is easy to describe intuitively. It is, however, surprisingly difficult to specify their behaviour in detail. In particular, the popular precondition-based approach tends to produce somewhat unwieldy descriptions if advanced features of the object language are taken into account. This has resulted in refactoring implementations that are complex, hard to understand, and even harder to maintain, yet these implementations themselves are the only precise “specification” of many refactorings. We have in past work advocated a different approach based on several complementary notions of dependencies that guide the implementation, and on the concept of microrefactorings that structure it. We show in this work that these concepts are powerful enough to provide high-level specifications of many of the refactorings implemented in Eclipse. These specificatio...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: OOPSLA
• Authors: Max Schäfer, Oege de Moor
• Keywords: OOPSLA 2010, Popular Precondition-based Approach, Refactoring, Security Privacy, Simple Automated Refactorings