The LAN-simulation: a refactoring teaching example

The notion of refactoring - transforming the source-code of an object-oriented program without changing its external behaviour - has been studied intensively within the last decade. This diversity has created a plethora of toy-examples, cases and code snippets, which make it hard to assess the current state-of-the-art. Moreover, due to this diversity, there is currently no accepted way of teaching good refactoring practices, despite the acknowledgment in the software engineering body of knowledge. Therefore, this paper presents a common example - the LAN simulation - which has been used by a number of European Universities for both research and teaching purposes.