I am running a session entitled Refactoring: Where Do I Start? at the first Agile Development Practices conference. Although I plan to speak for a few minutes, I’d like to spend most of the time answering your questions and refactoring some real code on stage. As a result, I’d like your code! I have a sample code base to refactor, but I’d rather refactor your code, to show everything that goes into refactoring: learning a code base, making some initial small refactorings, then envisioning how they can collect into something bigger and more significant. I put out the challenge to you, then: give me your code and I’ll refactor it!

Here are the guidelines:

1. Java or Ruby, please. I’ll look at other code bases, but this session is not the time for me to be learning the finer points of a language.
2. If it’s Java code, it must compile. If you want to take a small section of your code base out, put back enough libraries or stubs to make it compile.
3. It must do something useful to someone. It can have bugs, but it can’t be a total mess. I don’t want to spend most of the time getting your code to do something, anything. If a refactoring uncovers a possible bug, that’s cool.

A request: if you can send the code to me as an Eclipse project, that would be great. It’s not absolutely required, but it would help. If I can’t get the code compiling and running in Eclipse within 15 minutes, I’ll probably give up and move on.

If you have a code base you’d like to send me, please e-mail me at refactoring the beautiful at sign diasparsoftware the dazzling dot com and I’ll give you instructions where to send the code. Thanks!