Refactorings without names

As with design patterns before, the naming and cataloguing of refactorings has contributed significantly to the recognition of the discipline. However, in practice concrete refactoring needs may deviate from what has been distilled as a named refactoring, and mapping these needs to a series of such refactorings — if at all possible — can be difficult. To address this, we propose a framework of specifying refactorings in an ad hoc fashion, and demonstrate its feasibility by presenting an implementation. Evaluation is done by simulating application through a user on a set of given sample programs. Results suggest that our proposal of ad hoc refactoring is, for the investigated scenarios at least, viable.