IntelliTC
Oleg Smirnov, Ameya Ketkar, Timofey Bryksin, Nikolaos Tsantalis, Danny Dig · 2022
Developers often change types of program elements. Such refactoring often involves updating not only the type of the element itself, but also the API of all type-dependent references in the code, thus it is tedious and time-consuming. Despite type changes being more frequent than renamings, just a few current IDE tools provide partially-automated support only for a small set of hard-coded types. Researchers have recently proposed a data-driven approach to inferring API rewrite rules for type change patterns in Java using code commits history. In this paper, we build upon these recent advances and introduce IntelliTC --- a tool to perform Java type change refactoring. We implemented it as a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA, a popular Java IDE developed by JetBrains. We present 3 different ways of providing support for such a refactoring from the standpoint of the user experience: Classic mode, Suggested Refactoring, and Inspection mode. To evaluate these modalities of using IntelliTC, we surveyed 22 experienced software developers. They positively rated the usefulness of the tool.