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Wed 12 Oct 2022 09:30 - 10:00 at Ballroom A - Tool Poster Session 2Refactoring software can be hard and time-consuming. Several refactoring tools assist developers in reaching more readable and maintainable code. However, most of them are characterized by long feedback loops that impoverish their refactoring experience. We believe that we can reduce this problem by focusing on the concept of Live Refactoring and its main principles: the live recommendation and continuous visualization of refactoring candidates, and the immediate visualization of results from applying a refactoring to the code. Therefore, we implemented a Live Refactoring Environment that identifies, suggests, and applies Extract Method refactorings. To evaluate our approach, we carried out an empirical experiment. Early results showed us that our refactoring environment improves several code quality aspects, being well received, understood, and used by the experiment participants. The source code of our tool is available on: https://github.com/saracouto1318/LiveRef. Its demonstration video can be found at: https://youtu.be/_jxx21ZiQ0o.
Complex software can be hard to read, adapt, and maintain. Refactoring it can create cleaner and self-explanatory code. Refactoring tools try to guide developers towards better code, with more quality. However, most of them take too long to provide feedback, support, and guidance on how developers should improve their software. To reduce this problem, we explored the concept of Live Refactoring, focusing on visually suggesting and applying refactorings, in real-time. With this in mind, we developed a Live Refactoring Environment that visually identifies, recommends, and applies Extract Method refactorings. To validate it, we conducted an empirical experiment. Early results showed that our approach improved several code quality metrics. Besides, we also concluded that our results were significantly different and better than the ones from refactoring the code manually without further help.