Speaker: Rani Ettinger, IBM Haifa Research Lab

Title: Re-Approaching the Refactoring Rubicon +  Impressions from OOPSLA 08
and the Second Workshop on Refactoring Tools (WRT)

Abstract:

In this talk , Rani will tell us of his impressions from a recent trip to
the conference on Object Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and
Applications (OOPSLA - http://www.oopsla.org/oopsla2008/) in Nashville TN,
focusing in particular on the Second Workshop on Refactoring Tools (WRT -
https://agora.cs.uiuc.edu/display/wrt08/Home and
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/dig/RefactoringInfo/WRT08/).
The talk will also cover a position-paper Rani has co-authored with Yishai
Feldman and Aharon Abadi, as was presented in WRT. Here's that paper's
abstract:

Fowler saw the availability of automated support for the Extract
Method refactoring in modern IDEs as an indication for the crossing of
the refactoring Rubicon.  In spite of the advances in refactoring
technology, it seems that this Rubicon has not yet been crossed, and
refactoring support in modern IDEs leave a lot to be desired.

We performed a case study in which we converted a Java servlet to use
the model-view-controller pattern, using as much automated support as
available.  We found that while the whole conversion could be
described as a series of refactorings, most of these were inadequately
supported by the IDE, and some were not supported at all.

Based on these findings, we outline the requirements from a
refactoring framework that will support much more of the conversion
process, and will also enable the composition of small refactorings
into larger ones.