Section: Research Program

Refactoring and Transformation

The second goal, to be able to safely refactor or transform source code can be realized in strong collaboration with extraction and analysis.

Software refactoring is usually understood as changing software with the purpose of increasing its readability and maintainability rather than changing its external behavior. Refactoring is an essential tool in all agile software engineering methodologies. Refactoring is usually supported by an interactive refactoring tool and consists of the following steps:

• Select a code fragment to refactor.

• Select a refactoring to apply to it.

• Optionally, provide extra parameter needed by the refactoring (e.g., a new name in a renaming).

The refactoring tool will now test whether the preconditions for the refactoring are satisfied. Note that this requires fact extraction from the source code. If this fails the user is informed. The refactoring tool shows the effects of the refactoring before effectuating them. This gives the user the opportunity to disable the refactoring in specific cases.The refactoring tool applies the refactoring for all enabled cases. Note that this implies a transformation of the source code. Some refactorings can be applied to any programming language (e.g., rename) and others are language specific (e.g., Pull Up Method). At http://www.refactoring.com an extensive list of refactorings can be found.

There is hardly any general and pragmatic theory for refactoring, since each refactoring requires different static analysis techniques to be able to check the preconditions. Full blown semantic specification of programming languages have turned out to be infeasible, let alone easily adaptable to small changes in language semantics. On the other hand, each refactoring is an instance of the extract, analyze and transform paradigm. Software transformation regards more general changes such as adding functionality and improving non-functional properties like performance and reliability. It also includes transformation from/to the same language (source-to-source translation) and transformation between different languages (conversion, translation). The underlying techniques for refactoring and transformation are mostly the same. We base our source code transformation techniques on the classical concept of term rewriting, or aspects thereof. It offers simple but powerful pattern matching and pattern construction features (list matching, AC Matching), and type-safe heterogenous data-structure traversal methods that are certainly applicable for source code transformation.