Use, Disuse, and Misuse of Automated Refactorings

Google Tech Talk October 1, 2012 Presented by Mohsen Vakilian ABSTRACT Though refactoring tools have been available for more than a decade, research has shown that programmers under-utilize such tools. However, little is known about why programmers do not take advantage of these tools. We have conducted a field study on programmers in their natural settings and interviewed nine participants. In this talk, I will present some of the results of our empirical study, which appeared in ICSE 2012 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2012.6227190). Our study reveals some of the factors that affect the use of automated refactorings such as invocation method, awareness, naming, trust, and predictability and the major mismatches between programmers' expectations and automated refactorings. Based on these results, we recently proposed a compositional approach to automating refactoring. This talk will give a brief overview of this new model of refactoring and its comparison with the existing wizard-based model (http://hdl.handle.net/2142/30851). This is joint work with Nicholas Chen, Roshanak Zilouchian Moghaddam, Stas Negara, Balaji Ambresh Rajkumar, Brian P. Bailey, and Ralph E. Johnson. Speaker: Mohsen Vakilian is a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on improving the productivity of developers in refactoring. Mohsen got his MS at UIUC in 2009. His master's thesis proposed a refactoring tool for inferring the type annotations of DPJ, a safe parallel programming language developed at UIUC. Before going to Illinois, Mohsen got his BS at the University of Tehran in 2007.