Empirical Evaluation of a Live Environment for Extract Method Refactoring

TL;DR

This paper presents a live refactoring environment that visually suggests and applies Extract Method refactorings in real-time, improving code quality metrics and outperforming manual refactoring.

Contribution

It introduces a novel live refactoring environment that provides real-time visual suggestions and automatic application of Extract Method refactorings.

Findings

Improved code quality metrics with live refactoring

Significantly better results than manual refactoring

Real-time visual suggestions aid developers

Abstract

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.