2026-09-19T13:25:29Z https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/50602 2023-07-11 col_2142_5131 col_2142_10761 com_2142_5130 com_2142_10755 com_2142_234

Johnson, Ralph E. Johnson, Ralph E. Adve, Vikram S. Bailey, Brian P. Ernst, Michael D. Vakilian, Mohsen 2014-09-16T17:24:17Z 2014-09-16T17:24:17Z 2014-08 2014-09-16 2014-08 Software rapidly evolves. A refactoring is a code change that preserves the behavior of the program. There has been much interest in automation to make refactoring more efficient and reliable. Although modern Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) provide many automated refactorings, studies suggest that programmers underuse automated refactorings. Based on our studies of programmers’ refactoring practices, we argue that usability problems are the common reasons of underusing automated refactorings. We introduce compositional refactoring, a new paradigm of automating refactorings. In this paradigm, the tool designer decomposes the large refactorings into a set of smaller, primitive changes and automates the primitive changes. Then, programmers compose the primitive changes to make larger changes. We have used the compositional paradigm to automate two classes of refactorings: the refactorings supported by modern IDEs and type qualifier inference. Type qualifiers augment a type system to check more properties of the software. Automated inference of type qualifiers can reduce the cost of using type qualifiers. The compositional paradigm enabled us to build the first universal type qualifier inference system. The system takes an existing type qualifier checker as an input and uses it to assist programmers in inserting type qualifiers. Our studies show that compositional refactoring is natural to programmers, gives programmers more control, and makes the automation more predictable and usable than the existing wizard-based and batch paradigms. The compositional paradigm achieves higher usability by automating less. Although this phenomenon may seem counterintuitive, it is not uncommon in automation design. The promising results of the compositional paradigm suggest that other software development automation technologies may also achieve a wider adoption by reducing the level of automation. Item withdrawn by Laura Spradlin (lspradl2@illinois.edu) on 2014-07-17T15:11:23Z Item was in collections: University of Illinois Theses & Dissertations (ID: 1) No. of bitstreams: 1 Vakilian_Mohsen.pdf: 1273451 bytes, checksum: 3918b0abda77a40cc2c37ab539925cfa (MD5) Made available in DSpace on 2014-09-16T17:24:17Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Mohsen_Vakilian.pdf: 1273287 bytes, checksum: 6a9c4a58833a1bb86e97dbc09f749637 (MD5) license.txt: 4065 bytes, checksum: 84ab1c78502a6c4bae8a73f145812c5c (MD5) http://hdl.handle.net/2142/50602 en Copyright 2014 Mohsen Vakilian Software Engineering Human-Computer Interaction Programming Languages Empirical Refactoring Program Transformation Type Qualifier Inference Type System Type Inference Compositional Critical Incident Technique Usability Evaluation Methodology Software Evolution Programming Environment Less is sometimes more in the automation of software evolution tasks text Computer Science 1434 Computer Science 0112 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Dissertation Ph.D. PHD:Computer Science -UIUC 10KS0112PHD