Refactoring Operations Grounded in Manual Code Changes

Abstract

Refactoring tools automate tedious and error-prone source code changes. The prevalence and difficulty of refactorings in software development makes this a high-impact area for successful automation of manual operations. Automated refactorings tools can improve the speed and accuracy of software development and are easily accessible in many programming environments. Even so, developers frequently eschew automation in favor of manual refactoring and cite reasons like lack of support for real usage scenarios and unpredictable tools. In this paper, we propose to redesign refactoring operations into transformations that are useful and applicable in real software evolution scenarios with the help of repository mining and user studies.