Design of e-activities for the learning of code refactoring tasks

Gaviria-López, Carlos Alberto; Alonso, Jesús Manuel García; Marticorena, Raúl; Maudes, Jesús

doi:10.1109/siie.2014.7017701

Cited by 10 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Refactoring was already studied in scenarios such as code review, 19,25,37,38 code understanding, 32,39-41 and education. 42,43 However, these studies do not propose catalogs of refactorings operations to improve software practices. Most of them also focus on single refactoring operations.…”

Section: Batch and Composite Refactoringsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a catalog of composite refactorings

Brito

Hora

Valente

2023

J Software Evolu Process

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Catalogs of refactoring have key importance in software maintenance and evolution, since developers rely on such documents to understand and perform refactoring operations. Furthermore, these catalogs constitute a reference guide for communication between practitioners since they standardize a common refactoring vocabulary. Fowler's book describes the most popular catalog of refactorings, which documents single and well‐known refactoring operations. However, sometimes, refactorings are composite transformations, that is, a sequence of refactorings is performed over a given program element. For example, a sequence of Extract Method operations (a single refactoring) can be performed over the same method, in one or in multiple commits, to simplify its implementation, therefore, leading to a Method Decomposition operation (a composite refactoring). In this paper, we propose and document a catalog with eight composite refactorings. We also implement a set of scripts to mine composite refactorings by preprocessing the results of refactoring detection tools. Using such scripts, we search for composites in a representative refactoring oracle with hundreds of confirmed single refactoring operations. Next, to complement this first study, we also search for composites in the full history of 10 well‐known open‐source projects. We characterize the detected composite refactorings, under dimensions such as size and location. We conclude by addressing the applications and implications of the proposed catalog.

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Section: Batch and Composite Refactoringsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a catalog of composite refactorings

Brito

Hora

Valente

2023

J Software Evolu Process

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show abstract

“…Refactoring was already studied scenarios such as code review [19,25,38,39], code understanding [30,34,40,41], and education [42,43]. However, these studies do not propose catalogs of refactorings operations to improve software practices.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a Catalog of Composite Refactorings

Brito¹,

Hora²,

Valente³

2022

Preprint

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Catalogs of refactoring have key importance in software maintenance and evolution, since developers rely on such documents to understand and perform refactoring operations. Furthermore, these catalogs constitute a reference guide for communication between practitioners since they standardize a common refactoring vocabulary. Fowler's seminal book on refactoring describes the most popular catalog of refactorings, which documents single and well-known refactoring operations. However, sometimes refactorings are composite transformations, i.e., a sequence of refactorings performed over a given program element. For example, a sequence of Extract Method operations (a single refactoring) can be performed over the same method, in one or in multiple commits, to simplify its implementation, therefore, leading to a Method Decomposition operation (a composite refactoring). In this paper, we propose and document a catalog with six composite refactorings. We also extend a refactoring detection tool to identify such composite refactoring in commits histories. We rely on our tool extension to mine composite refactorings in ten well-known open source projects and characterize the detected composite refactorings, under dimensions such as size and location. Finally, we qualitatively study the descriptions of commits including composite refactorings to shed preliminary light on the motivations behind such operations. We conclude by addressing the applications and implications of the proposed catalog.

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“…Further research related to our approach can be roughly divided into the following two groups: (1) teaching software refactoring and (2) serious games (and gamification) in software engineering education. Teaching Software Refactoring Closely related are learning environments and tutoring systems for refactoring (see, e.g., [33,34]). In particular, Sandalski et al propose an intelligent analyzer assistant very similar to a refactoring recommendation system (see, e.g., [9]) which identifies and highlights simple code-smell candidates [33].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…After the student's code modification, it reacts by proposing (better) refactoring options. In addition, López et al report on a study for teaching refactoring [34]. They propose exemplary refactoring task categories and classify them according to Bloom's taxonomy and according to learning types.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Serious Refactoring Games

Haendler

Neumann

2019

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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Software design issues can severely impede software development and maintenance. Thus, it is important for the success of software projects that developers are aware of bad smells in code artifacts and improve their skills to reduce these issues via refactoring. However, software refactoring is a complex activity and involves multiple tasks and aspects. Therefore, imparting competences for identifying bad smells and refactoring code efficiently is challenging for software engineering education and training. The approaches proposed for teaching software refactoring in recent years mostly concentrate on small and artificial tasks and fall short in terms of higher level competences, such as analysis and evaluation. In this paper, we investigate the possibilities and challenges of designing serious games for software refactoring on real-world code artifacts. In particular, we propose a game design, where students can compete either against a predefined benchmark (technical debt) or against each other. In addition, we describe a lightweight architecture as the technical foundation for the game design that integrates pre-existing analysis tools such as test frameworks and software-quality analyzers. Finally, we provide an exemplary game scenario to illustrate the application of serious games in a learning setting.

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Design of e-activities for the learning of code refactoring tasks

Cited by 10 publications

References 1 publication

Towards a catalog of composite refactorings

Towards a catalog of composite refactorings

Towards a Catalog of Composite Refactorings

Serious Refactoring Games

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