Successful software products evolve through a process of continuous change as bugs are fixed, new features added, and quality issues addressed. Refactoring supports the volatile software lifecycle by providing better ways to reduce and manage the growing complexity of software systems while improving developer productivity. Refactoring can be performed at all levels from requirement specification down to source code level, and, in essence, involves improving the internal structure of a software artifact without altering its functionality. In spite of the popularity of refactoring both in practice and as a research topic, many open questions remain, particularly in terms of understanding how refactoring is performed, measuring the impact of refactoring, and improving tool support in all areas of refactoring.

Technical full research papers accepted for presentation at IWoR 2021 will be invited to be revised and extended for consideration in a thematic special issue of the Elsevier’s Information and Software Technology Journal (IST).

We invite submissions from both academia and industry on any topic that is refactoring related, including:

• Source code refactoring
• Requirement, design and architectural refactoring
• Refactoring opportunities detection and recommendation
• Tool support for refactoring
• Mining refactoring changes from software repositories
• Evaluation and benchmarking of refactoring methods
• Code smell detection and correction
• Effect of refactoring on system complexity and quality
• Empirical studies and experience reports
• Software remodularization
• Model transformation
• Introduction of design patterns through refactoring
• Machine learning applied to software refactoring
• Role of refactoring in evolution and migration
• Refactoring of mobile, web and cloud applications

We solicit four types of submissions:

• Full research papers (max 8 pages)
• Position papers (max 4 pages)
• Tool demo papers (max 4 pages)
• Industrial presentation (max 2 pages)

These different categories offer researchers who are at different stages in their research maturity the opportunity to benefit from workshop participation. Page limits include references, figures and appendices.

All paper submissions will be reviewed by three program committee members. The authors of accepted submissions will be asked to join the workshop. We will encourage all participants to submit a paper of any of the four categories (i.e., full research papers, position papers, tool demo papers, and industrial presentation), but the workshop will be open. All interested parties are welcome to register, even without an accepted paper.

All submissions must be formatted according to the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt font, LaTEX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf option) and should be submitted through EasyChair at:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iwor21

Submissions should not disclose the identity of the authors to comply with the double-blind review process employed by IWoR. The authors’ names must be omitted from the submission (in particular, in the title page and hearders of the paper) and references to their prior work should be in the third person.

The official publication date of the workshop proceedings is the date the proceedings are made available by IEEE. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ASE 2021. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.