One of the costs of reusing software components is updating applications to use the new
version of the components. Updating an application can be error-prone, tedious, and …

As object-oriented class libraries evolve, classes are occasionally deprecated in favor of
others with roughly the same functionality. In Java's standard libraries, for example, class …

Refactorings are behaviour-preserving program transformations, typically for improving the
structure of existing code. A few of these transformations have been mechanised in …

Descriptive names are crucial to understand code. However, good names are notoriously
hard to choose and manually changing a globally visible name can be a maintenance …

Refactoring is a popular technique for improving the structure of existing programs while
maintaining their behavior. For statically typed programming languages such as Java, a …

Type constraints express subtype relationships between the types of program expressions,
for example, those relationships that are required for type correctness. Type constraints were …

Java 1.5 generics enable the creation of reusable container classes with compiler-enforced
type-safe usage. This eliminates the need for potentially unsafe down-casts when retrieving …

Recent versions of the Java standard library offer flexible locking constructs that go beyond
the language's built-in monitor locks in terms of features, and that can be fine-tuned to suit …

Type safety and expressiveness of many existing Java libraries and their client applications
would improve, if the libraries were upgraded to define generic classes. Efficient and …

Automated tool support for refactoring is now widely available for mainstream programming
languages such as Java. However, current refactoring tools are still quite fragile in practice …