Helping software developers through live software metrics visualization

Abstract

With the increasing complexity of software systems, software developers would benefit from instant and continuous feedback about the system they are maintaining and evolving. Despite existing several solutions providing feedback and suggesting improvements, many tools require explicit invocations, leading developers to miss some improvement opportunities, such as important refactorings, due to the loss of their train of thought. Therefore, to address these limitations, we developed a Visual Studio Code plugin providing real-time feedback --- and also information about each commit made to the version control system. This tool is also capable of recommending two types of refactorings. To validate this approach, we did a preliminary controlled experiment using hypothesis-tests to check specific results. However, in this initial stage, we didn't have enough data to confirm our research questions, and we weren't able yet to confirm the main hypothesis.