Refactoring to role objects

Role objects are a widely recognized design pattern for representing objects that expose different properties in different contexts. By developing a tool that automatically refactors legacy code towards this pattern and by applying this tool to several programs, we have found not only that refactoring to role objects as currently defined produces code that is hard to read and to maintain, but also that the refactoring has preconditions so strong that it is rarely applicable in practice. We have therefore taken a fresh look at role objects and devised an alternative form that solves the exact same design problems, yet is much simpler to introduce and to maintain. We describe refactoring to this new, lightweight form of role objects in informal terms and report on the implementation of our refactoring tool for the JAVA programming language, presenting evidence of the refactoring's increased applicability in several sample programs.