Evolving Object - Oriented Designs with Refactorings Lance

Refactorings are behavior-preserving program transformations that automate design level changes in object-oriented applications. Our previous research established that many schema transformations, design patterns, and hot-spot meta-patterns are automatable. This research evaluates whether refactoring technology can be transferred to the mainstream by restructuring non-trivial C++ applications. The applications that we examine were evolved manually by software engineers. We show that an equivalent evolution could be reproduced significantly faster and cheaper by applying a handful of general-purpose refactor-ings. In one application, over 14K lines of code were transformed automatically that otherwise would have been coded by hand. Our experiments identify benefits, limitations , and topics of further research related to the transfer of refactoring technology to a production environment.