Interactive and guided architectural refactoring with search based recommendation
Architectural refactorings can contain hundreds of steps and experienced developers could carry them out over several weeks. Moreover, developers need to explore a correct sequence of refactorings steps among many more incorrect alternatives. Thus, carrying out architectural refactorings is costly, risky, and challenging. In this paper, we present Refactoring Navigator: a tool supported and interactive recommendation approach for aiding architectural refactoring. Our approach takes a given implementation as the starting point, a desired high level design as the target, and iteratively recommends a series of refactoring steps. Moreover, our approach allows the user to accept, reject, or ignore a recommended refactoring step, and uses the user's feedback in further refactoring recommendations. We evaluated the effectiveness of our approach and tool using a controlled experiment and an industrial case study. The controlled experiment shows that the participants who used Refactoring Navigator accomplished their tasks in 77.4% less time and manually edited 98.3% fewer lines than the control group. The industrial case study suggests that Refactoring Navigator has the potential to help with architectural refactorings in practice.
SIGSOFT FSE