On the Customization of Batch Refactoring

Abstract

Refactorings are program transformations to improve code structure quality. Developers often apply these transformations in a batch, i.e., transformations in a sequence on a certain program location in order to achieve a specific goal. Either individual or batch refactorings often need to be customized to a particular program context. Otherwise, the developer may not be able to achieve his goal. Existing tools provide limited support for refactoring customization. IDE features do not allow developers to properly create their own custom refactoring. As a consequence, developers often feel reluctant to use these tools, and end up applying their refactorings manually. This position paper proposes an approach for developers to customize program transformations for their refactorings. The approach allows a developer to: (i) compose an individual or batch refactoring according to his context's needs, and (ii) reuse the custom refactorings in similar contexts. This novel approach has the potential to increase the use of automated refactoring, while allowing software companies to better tailor the IDE to their specific refactoring practices. From a research perspective, our approach motivates researchers to investigate better practices for refactoring customization.