Toward the automation of detection of refactoring opportunities

College

College of Computer Studies

Department/Unit

Computer Technology

Document Type

Archival Material/Manuscript

Publication Date

2014

Abstract

There is now considerable evidence that refactoring, which is the process of improving code structure without changing its behavior, is considered an important software engineering activity. However, although the major IDEs can already automate the performance of several refactorings, there is lack of plug-ins that automate the detection of refactoring opportunities, such plug-ins are especially useful for student programmers for various reasons. This paper describes an Eclipse plug-in that uses graph and metric based approaches to automate the detection of opportunities for performing eleven refactorings. Results show that graph based approaches might be more reliable than metric based approaches to refactoring opportunity detection, though both are necessary because different refactorings call for one or the other approach. The results also suggest that code duplication might be a common habit among computer science upperclassmen, and that inheritance might not be uses as much as it should be by computer science students.

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Disciplines

Computer Sciences

Note

Publication/creation date supplied

Keywords

Software refactoring

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