Sara Filipa Fernandes

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
Refactoring helps improve the design of software systems, making them more understandable, readable, maintainable, cleaner, and self-explanatory. Many refactoring tools allow developers to select and execute the best refactorings for their code. However, most of them lack quick and continuous feedback, support, and guidance, leading to a poor refactoring experience. To fill this gap, we are researching ways to increase liveness in refactoring. Live Refactoring consists of continuously knowing, in real-time, what and why to refactor. To explore the concept of Live Refactoring and its main components - recommendation, visualization, and application, we prototyped a Live Refactoring Environment focused on the Extract Method refactoring. With it, developers can receive recommendations about the best refactoring options and have support to apply them automatically. This work helped us reinforce the hypothesis that early and continuous refactoring feedback helps to shorten the time needed to create high-quality systems. © 2022 ACM.

Abstract
Refactoring helps to improve the design of software systems, making them more readable, maintainable, cleaner, and easy to expand. Most of the tools that already exist on this concept allow developers to select and execute the best refactoring techniques for a particular programming context. However, they aren't interactive and prompt enough, providing a poor programming experience. In this gap, we can introduce and combine the topic of liveness with refactoring methods. Live Refactoring allows to know continuously, while programming, the blocks of code that we should refactor and why they were classified as problematic. Therefore, it shortens the time needed to create high-quality systems, due to early and continuous refactoring feedback, support, and guidance. This paper presents our research project based on a live refactoring environment. This environment is focused on a refactoring tool that aims to explore the concept of Live Refactoring and its main components-recommendation, visualization, and application. © 2021 Owner/Author.

Abstract