Searching for Opportunities of Refactoring Sequences: Reducing the Search Space

During software development and evolution activities, the developers focus the refactoring efforts on choosing and applying refactoring patterns (or sequences of patterns) that are likely to improve the software quality. Considering the search for opportunities of refactoring sequences,the main problem is the size of the search space (there are too many possible sequences to be evaluated). We propose an approach to narrow the number of refactoring sequences by discarding those that semantically does not make sense and avoiding those that lead to the same results. We provide a detailed example of the approach considering sequences for method manipulation, showing how the number of sequences can be significantly reduced.