Towards a Live Environment for Code Refactoring

Abstract

Refactoring code manually can be complex. Several refactoring tools were developed to mitigate the effort needed to create more readable, adaptable, and maintainable code. However, most of them continue to provide late feedback, assistance, and support on how developers should improve their software. That’s where the concept of Live Refactoring comes in. We believe the immediate and continuous suggestion of refactoring candidates to the code will help reduce this problem. Therefore, we prototyped a Live Refactoring Environment that identifies, recommends, and applies Extract Method refactorings. We carried out an empirical experiment that showed us that our approach helped developers reach better code, with more quality, improving their refactoring experience.