Refactoring Tools and Complementary Techniques

Poorly designed software systems are difficult to understand and maintain. Modifying code in one place could lead to unwanted repercussions elsewhere due to high coupling. Adding new features can cause further quality degradation to the code if proper design and architectural concerns were not implemented. Development in a large enterprise system with such attributes will, over time, lead to a myriad of concerns unless the system is periodically overhauled or refactored in some way. Refactoring can aid the developer to improve the design of the code and to make it cleaner, without changing its behaviour. This study provides answers for some of the questions on refactoring. A refactoring tool survey is given. The IDEs surveyed include some of the most popular commercial and open source offerings from IntelliJ’s IDEA, IBM’s Eclipse and Sun’s Netbeans. We also explain a way to automatically find targets for refactorings via automatic detection of code smells from static code analys...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: AICCSA
• Authors: Martin Drozdz, Derrick G. Kourie, Bruce W. Watson, Andrew Boake
• Keywords: AICCSA 2006, Code, Refactoring, Refactoring Tool Survey