Refactoring is a transformation that preserves the external behavior of a program and improves its internal quality. Widely used IDEs, such as Eclipse and NetBeans, automate a number of refactorings. They automatically check preconditions to guarantee behavioral preservation. However, defining and implementing preconditions are complex tasks. As a result, even mainstream refactoring engines contain critical bugs. We propose an automated approach for testing of Java refactoring engines. It has been useful for identifying more than 100 bugs in state-of-the-art industrial and academic refactoring engines.

Gustavo Soares is a PhD student at Federal University of Campina Grande, Brazil, under supervision of Rohit Gheyi. His research interests in software engineering include software development, evolution and verification. He has received the ACM SIGPLAN John Vlissides Award and ACM Student Research Competition Award for his PhD work on automated testing refactorings.