Fourth Workshop on Refactoring Tools (WRT 2011)

Refactoring is the process of applying behavior-preserving transformations to a program with the objective of improving the program's design. A specific refactoring is identified by a name (e. g., Extract Method), a set of preconditions, and a set of transformations that need to be performed. Tool support for refactoring is essential because checking the preconditions of refactoring often requires nontrivial program analysis, and applying transformations may affect many locations throughout a program. In recent years, the emergence of light-weight programming methodologies such as Extreme Programming has generated a great amount of interest in refactoring, and refactoring support has become a required feature in today's IDEs. This workshop is a continuation of a series of previous workshops (ECOOP 2007, OOPSLA 2008 and 2009 - see http://refactoring.info/WRT) where researchers and developers of refactoring tools can meet and discuss recent ideas and work, and view tool demonstrations.