The reason for creating the taxonomy is to provide better understanding of the smells and to recognize the relationships between smells. I feel that with a long flat list of the code smells it is easy to lose the overall picture (at least that happened to me when I first studied the list of code smells in (Fowler&Beck 2000)). Thus, here is a taxonomy of five groups.

Working on large refactorings is quite different from working on smaller ones. In this article we have a closer look at some issues involved with large refactorings.

This article aims to teach you about some of the more common refactoring options, as well as to show you ways to use these options in everyday situations with your Java technology source code.

Rather theoretical article that reviews the effects on development costs when using either XP or a Big Design Upfront approach. The article is based upon Boehm's "cost of fixing errors" curve.

Patterns are a cornerstone of object-oriented design, while test-first programming and merciless refactoring are cornerstones of evolutionary design. To stop over- or under-engineering, balance these practices and evolve only what you need.

Describes how the refactoring of test code differs from the refactoring of production code. Presents a series of refactorings specifically design to reduce the bad smells of test code.

In this study we trace the effects of applying the techniques of refactoring and aggressive unit testing in source code based on historical information. We show how their impact on the evolution of the architecture can be testified. The study comprises the analysis of a large number of indiv idual integration versions of a large framework. The method described here can help development teams find weaknesses in their application of the two traced techniques.

Testing and refactoring are more intertwined that most XP developers realize. The authors propose notions of "refactoring sessions" and "test-first refactoring". This case study will show the interaction between testing and refactoring.

This paper will inforce adapting the unit tests before refactoring the application code. It is the best choice to support agile software development practice of test first design. Doing this in reverse would lead to a loss in control and safety.

Refactorings are usually performed with the help of a text-based editor or a refactoring browser. This is in contrast with UML based modeling tools, which are more visually oriented and work at a higher level of granularity. This article explores how such a modeling tool can be helpful both in identifiying smells and performing the refactorings.