FINDING REFACTORINGS USING LIGHTWEIGHT CODE ANALYSIS

Poorly structured code is hard to maintain and read. Refactoring can improve the code structure and thus make it easier to preserve and to discern the underlying design. According to Martin Fowler’s book Refac-toring, refactoring is “a change made to the internal structure of software to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify without changing its observable behavior. ” Refactoring is a difficult and time consuming process which makes it an unattractive activity for many developers. A tool that could automatically identify refactorable code sections and make fix suggestions would make refactoring much easier and faster. In my research I have developed the tool Look # for just this purpose. The Look # tool uses lightweight detection algorithms based on code metrics to identify refactorable code sections. Each refactoring technique that Look # can detect has been distilled down into a lightweight algo-rithm based on thresholds and syntactic keywords. Some refactoring techniques are detected by calculating code metrics and then evaluating if those code metric counts exceed a certain threshold. Other refactoring techniques are detected by looking for certain syntactic indicators, like a public access modifier on a field. Many of the guidelines Martin Fowler provides for determining when to apply certain refactoring methods are based on “human intuition ” and abstract perceptions. This makes it extremely difficult to automaticall