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I’d like to
compare Dr. Jones’ knowledge about refactoring to that of another research
project, the Smalltalk Refactoring Browser developed at UIUC.
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The Refactoring
Browser was primarily concerned with giving the user a safe and reliable tool
– the user could trust it to know when a refactoring is behavior-preserving,
and if so to transform the source correctly.
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Dr Jones on the
other hand has knowledge that will give the user visual feedback on the new
designs generated by refactoring, prevent bad refactorings, and
suggest`follow-up’ refactorings.
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These kinds of
knowledge haven’t been explicitly considered before in a refactoring tool,
and I believe my specifications of it represents a contribution to
refactoring research.
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I also believe
these two bodies of knowledge are complementary, and a tool that integrates,
for example, design diagnosis, design exploration and source transformation
would be a more complete solution and a fruitful direction for future work.
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