An-Najah Staff

This paper reports on an aspect of an ongoing study whose overall objective is to explore the consequences of isolating prototypical transformations used in building refactorings. These have been called fine-grained transformations (FGTs) and have been built into a Prolog-based prototype refactoring tool. The paper shows how this tool uses FGTs to build composite refactorings from primitive refactorings. It indicates how composite-level and FGT-enabling preconditions can be derived and utilised to avoid the rollback problem. FGT-based composite refactorings therefore retain the advantages of building composite refactorings from primitive ones, but simultaneously offer the additional potential benefits to be derived from a more fine-grained exposition of the refactoring task.