Holistic Semi-Automated Software Refactoring

Post-deployment maintenance and evolution can account for up to 75% of the cost of developing a software system. Software refactoring can reduce the costs associated with evolution by improving system quality, but although refactoring can yield benefits, the process includes potentially complex, error-prone, tedious and timeconsuming tasks. It is these tasks that automated refactoring tools seek to address. However, although the refactoring process is well-defined, current refactoring tools do not support the full process. In this paper we present a study of refactoring in terms of automation and situation awareness in order to propose an ideal allocation of tasks between the user and automated refactoring support environments. This allocation defines an ideal level of automation designed to remove from the user unnecessary and undesirable processing tasks whilst still maintaining the user’s understanding of the system they are refactoring. The developed ideal was compared to four sample refactoring support tools to identify where improvement is needed to better support users