Navigating through the Archipelago of Refactorings

The essence of refactoring is to improve software quality via the systematic combination of primitive refactorings. Yet, there are way too many refactorings. Choosing which refactorings to use, how to combine them and how to integrate them in more complex evolution tasks is really hard. Our vision is to provide the developer with a trip advisor for the archipelago of refactorings. The core idea of our approach is the map of the archipelago of refactorings, which identifies the basic relations that guide the systematic and effective combination of refactorings. Based on the map, the trip advisor makes suggestions that allow the developer to decide how to start, assess the possible alternatives, have a clear picture of what has to be done before, during and after the refactorings and assess the possible implications.