My main research focus is refactoring, and the way it affects quality. As I don't merely want to perform interesting, but also useful research, I am very interested in the way the refactoring process is applied in practice.

The goal of my research is to gather knowledge to tackle the trade-off-analysis during the refactoring process. Therefore, I am investigating refactorings in their Return On Investment regarding program quality.

Therefore, I am writing a catalogue which presents the quality drift associated with the refactorings provided by Martin Fowler in terms of internal program quality metrics. This allows programmers to envision the quality impact, before applying a refactoring.

Secondly, I am preparing experiments with both university students and software professionals in order to evaluate the use of refactoring strategies in terms of maintenance task effort and maintenance task correctness. A refactoring strategie is a toolkit of specific refactorings with a common goal, i.e. reorganize the architectural layout, or reorganize the sub-architectural layout, target data management or control flow, etc., which all provide choices that can be made during the trade-off-analysis of the refactoring process.

Homepage: http://win-www.uia.ac.be/u/bdubois/

I'm looking forward to delighting discussions about these fascinating subjects with you!