Refactoring code manually can be complex. Several refactoring tools were developed to mitigate the effort needed to create more readable, adaptable, and maintainable code. However, most of them continue to provide late feedback, assistance, and support on how developers should improve their software. That’s where the concept of Live Refactoring comes in. We believe the immediate and continuous suggestion of refactoring candidates to the code will help reduce this problem. Therefore, we prototyped a Live Refactoring Environment that identifies, recommends, and applies Extract Method refactorings. We carried out an empirical experiment that showed us that our approach helped developers reach better code, with more quality, improving their refactoring experience.

Refactoring software can be hard and time-consuming. Several refactoring tools assist developers in reaching more readable and maintainable code. However, most of them are characterized by long feedback loops that impoverish their refactoring experience. We believe that we can reduce this problem by focusing on the concept of Live Refactoring and its main principles: the live recommendation and continuous visualization of refactoring candidates, and the immediate visualization of results from applying a refactoring to the code. Therefore, we implemented a Live Refactoring Environment that identifies, suggests, and applies Extract Method refactorings. To evaluate our approach, we carried out an empirical experiment. Early results showed us that our refactoring environment improves several code quality aspects, being well received, understood, and used by the experiment participants. The source code of our tool is available on: https://github.com/saracouto1318/LiveRef. Its demonstration video can be found at: https://youtu.be/_jxx21ZiQ0o.

Refactoring helps to improve the design of software systems, making them more readable, maintainable, cleaner, and easy to expand. Most of the tools that already exist on this concept allow developers to select and execute the best refactoring techniques for a particular programming context. However, they aren’t interactive and prompt enough, providing a poor programming experience. In this gap, we can introduce and combine the topic of liveness with refactoring methods. Live Refactoring allows to know continuously, while programming, the blocks of code that we should refactor and why they were classified as problematic. Therefore, it shortens the time needed to create high-quality systems, due to early and continuous refactoring feedback, support, and guidance. This paper presents our research project based on a live refactoring environment. This environment is focused on a refactoring tool that aims to explore the concept of Live Refactoring and its main components --- recommendation, visualization, and application.

This poster presents a pilot project on non-conventional learning strategies based on students? active participation in real-life FLOSS projects. The aim of the project is to validate the hypothesis that the peer-production model, which underlies most FLOSS projects, can enhance the learning-teaching process based on extensive and systematic collaborative practices.