high velocity refactorings in eclipse - ncsu coe people.pptVIP

multiview research High Velocity Refactorings In Eclipse Emerson Murphy-Hill and Andrew P. Black Eclipse Technology Exchange October 21, 2007 Background Refactoring is restructuring code without changing behavior Refactoring tools semi-automate the process of refactoring Refactoring tools are important because they promise to be fast and accurate The Problem Refactoring tools are too slow 40% of developers say they can refactor faster by hand Tools don’t always fit well with add-refactor-add-refactor workflow The Cause of the Problem Activation is slow: Selection Initiation Configuration Selection Error prone Typically single-element refactoring only Not obvious what to select Initiation Menus big Hotkeys hard to remember Configuration Obstructs code view Forces configuration (25% useful) Solution 1: Refactoring Marking Menus Solution 2: Refactoring Cues Evaluation Refactoring Marking Menus Previous results: faster, a little more accurate Memory results: intuitive to initiate Refactoring Cues Demonstration of operational equivalence, but better in significant cases Opinions at OSCON 2007 People willing to try Future Work Integrate marking menus and refactoring cues Cues are hard to see at depth Pick better cue colors Duplication display in cues Larger refactoring process Contributions A consistent selection mechanism that almost eliminates errors A tool that allows multiple refactorings An fast, memorable initiation mechanism Guidelines for building more usable tools Questions? (see the poster!) References Callahan, J., Hopkins, D., Weiser, M., and Shneiderman, B. 1988. An empirical comparison of pie vs. linear menus. In Proc. of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Washington, D.C., United States, May 1988). J. J. OHare, Ed. CHI ’88. ACM Press, New York, NY, 95-100. Fowler, M. 1999. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Inc. Hong, J. I. and Landay, J. A. 2000. SATIN: a toolkit for info