The Search for Aspect-Oriented Refactorings Must Go On (Position paper)

In this paper, we argue that current research in aspect-oriented refactoring can benefit from specific efforts to develop a new coding style appropriate for aspect-orientation. This notion can be captured through catalogues of refactorings and code smells, after which it can provide a basis for tool developers. We successfully derived useful insights from the study of toy examples and think their potential has not been fully explored yet. We will continue to include toy examples in our next research work, hoping to obtain further insights, which will then be tested and developed with larger code bases.