Overview of the Refactoring Discovering Problem

Refactoring support is currently aimed at automatically finding and applying individual transformation steps. Some techniques exist to suggest wider design changes that can be made to a system in order to improve certain design characteristics. Therefore, the sequence of refactorings needed to perform the proposed changes must be found by the developer. Support for complex refactoring sequences generation and execution could help on high level software systems redesigning, allowing the inclusion of very high level refactorings as a regular technique in the software development process. This paper presents which formalisms, techniques and tools we are exploring to address this problem, and shows the conclusions reached so far.