Teaching Students to Build Well Formed Object-Oriented Methods Through Refactoring

Refactoring is the process of transforming the internal structure of existing code while keeping the integrity of the code\u27s functional requirements. Refactoring is proven to increase program maintainability, flexibility, and understandability and is recognized as a best practice in the software development community. However, with the exception of courses or lectures on extreme programming, refactoring is overlooked in the computer science curriculum. This paper presents the fourth lesson of an innovative pedagogical approach to teaching refactoring on the college level. This lesson covers the creation of well formed object-oriented methods including characteristics for evaluating such methods. Through this hands-on approach, building well formed object-oriented methods through refactoring can be better understood and integrated into the computer science curriculum

An Innovative Approach to Teaching Refactoring

Refactoring is the process of transforming the internal structure of existing code while keeping the integrity of the code\u27s functional requirements. Refactoring is proven to increase program maintainability, flexibility, and understandability and is recognized as a best practice in the software development community. However, with the exception of courses or lectures on extreme programming, refactoring is overlooked in the computer science curriculum. This paper helps demystify refactoring by introducing an incremental approach for teaching refactoring on the college level. Through this hands-on approach, refactoring can become an integral component in the computer science curriculum and an innovative means of reinforcing software engineering principles and good development practices. The approach and three introductory lessons are presented in this paper

A Framework for an Adaptive Refactoring Tool

Refactoring is the process of making changes to the internal structure of existing code without changing the external behavior of that code, The resulting code is more flexible, reusable, and maintainable. While refactoring is becoming more popular in the software development community, manual refactoring can be a long and tedious process. Tools that support refactoring are becoming available; however, many provide only limited types of refactorings and require heavy user intervention. This paper presents an open source framework for an adaptive refactoring tool. The framework allows easy addition of new refactorings or modification of existing ones. An implementation of the framework is described in this paper

An innovative approach to teaching refactoring

Refactoring is the process of transforming the internal structure of existing code while keeping the integrity of the code\u27s functional requirements. Refactoring is proven to increase program maintainability, flexibility, and understandability and is recognized as a best practice in the software development community. However, with the exception of courses or lectures on extreme programming, refactoring is overlooked in the computer science curriculum. This paper helps demystify refactoring by introducing an incremental approach for teaching refactoring on the college level. Through this hands-on approach, refactoring can become an integral component in the computer science curriculum and an innovative means of reinforcing software engineering principles and good development practices. The approach and three introductory lessons are presented in this paper

Teaching students to build well formed object-oriented methods through refactoring

Refactoring is the process of transforming the internal structure of existing code while keeping the integrity of the code\u27s functional requirements. Refactoring is proven to increase program maintainability, flexibility, and understandability and is recognized as a best practice in the software development community. However, with the exception of courses or lectures on extreme programming, refactoring is overlooked in the computer science curriculum. This paper presents the fourth lesson of an innovative pedagogical approach to teaching refactoring on the college level. This lesson covers the creation of well formed object-oriented methods including characteristics for evaluating such methods. Through this hands-on approach, building well formed object-oriented methods through refactoring can be better understood and integrated into the computer science curriculum