Darren C. Atkinson and Todd King, “Lightweight detection of program refactorings,” in Proceedings of the 12th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, pp. 663–670, December 2005.
Abstract
Poorly structured code is hard to maintain and read. Program refactoring can improve code structure and thus make it easier to preserve and to discern the underlying design. However, refactoring is a difficult and time-consuming process making it unattractive for many developers. An automated tool that could identify poorly structured code and make suggestions would make the refactoring process easier. Although in general refactorings may be quite difficult to locate automatically, we show that many can be detected using low-cost, syntactic techniques. We have built a tool to locate refactorings in C# programs. Our experiments indicate that the tool has an excellent success rate in identifying refactorings.
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