Making Programmers Aware Of Refactorings.
Peter Weißgerber, Benjamin Biegel, Stephan Diehl · 2007
Modern integrated development environments, such as ECLIPSE, provide automated or semi-automated refactoring support. Despite this support, refactorings are often done manually — either because the developer is not aware of the tool support or because he is not aware that what he did was a refactoring. Moreover, as we found in [7] programmers tend to do a bad job in documenting the refactorings they have performed or even do not document them at all. In this paper we present the design rationale of a plug-in for the ECLIPSE development platform that informs programmers about the refactorings they have performed manually and provides hyper-links to web sites describing these. The plug-in is currently under development. Finally, it should support the developer in documenting refactorings by appending an exact description of each performed refactoring to the CVS/SVN log message. For such refactorings that have been done manually, but can be performed automatically using ECLIPSE, our tool should inform the developer that this tool support exists and it is much safer to use it than to implement the refactoring manually.