Refactoring Planning for Design Smell Correction: Summary, Opportunities and Lessons Learned

Complex refactoring processes, such as applying big refactorings or removing design smells are difficult to perform in practice. The complexity of these processes is partly due to their heuristic nature and to the constraints imposed by preconditions on the applicability of the individual refactorings. Developers have to find out manually how to apply a complex refactoring "recipe", from a refactoring book, for each particular situation. In a PhD thesis, we developed an approach for tackling this problem. We described how to better write refactoring "recipes" (Refactoring Strategies) and how to compute, from them, the precise refactoring sequences for each particular situation (Refactoring Plans). Our proposal introduced, for the first time, the use of automated planning for this kind of software engineering problems. This paper presents a short summary of that PhD thesis and discuss the future work, open questions, new research opportunities arisen and the lessons learned from it.