Refactoring is a transformation that preserves the external behavior of a program and
improves its internal quality. Usually, compilation errors and behavioral changes are …

Automated refactorings may change the program behavior. We propose an approach and its
implementation called SafeRefactor for making program refactoring safer. We applied 10 …

The C preprocessor is used in many C projects to support variability and portability.
However, researchers and practitioners criticize the C preprocessor because of its negative …

To safely evolve a software product line, it is important to have a notion of product line
refinement that assures behavior preservation of the original product line products. So in this …

The lack of formalism in most software developments can lead to a loss of precision and
correctness in the resulting software. Formal techniques of program development have been …

Some approaches have been used to investigate evidence on how developers refactor their
code, whether refactorings activities may decrease the number of bugs, or improve …

Software product lines enable generating related software products from reusable assets.
Adopting a product line strategy can bring significant quality and productivity improvements …

Regression testing checks that recent project changes do not break previously working
functionality. Although important, regression testing is costly when changes are frequent …

There is an extensive literature about refactorings of object-oriented programs, and many
refactoring tools for the Java programming language. However, except for a few studies, in …

A key challenge developers might face when evolving a product line is not to inadvertently
affect users of existing products. In refactoring and conservative extension scenarios, we can …