I-Corps: Search-Based Interactive Software Refactoring Technology

这个I-Corps项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力是显著提高软件开发人员在开发大型软件系统方面的生产力。提出的交互式重构技术可以帮助程序员半自动化的过程中，提高大型软件项目的质量，通过检测，优先级排序和纠正设计缺陷，影响理解和维护的软件项目的源代码的容易性。在大型项目中，程序员至少要花60%的时间来理解代码。这种交互式重构技术将大大减少时间，从而提高生产力并减少软件错误。建议的技术将允许程序员在发布新软件产品时满足高代码质量标准，并减少软件维护活动，这些活动可能消耗高达90%的典型软件项目总成本。这个I-Corps项目是通过推荐重构更改来半自动化提高软件质量的过程，使用计算搜索技术，而不是当前的手动重构工具支持。手动重构容易出错，耗时，并且对于需要广泛应用更改以纠正不健康代码的彻底重构没有用处。该技术将软件重构形式化为动态交互优化框架，提供以重构为中心的交互，使重构和开发并行进行，并以非侵入性方式收集交互信息，这些信息可用于动态通知重构过程。这项技术推荐了一些方法，使代码质量易于评估、改进、发展和推理。所提出的重构技术已经成功地被活跃的程序员在开源和工业项目中使用。基于交互式重构技术的高性能和低成本，它有可能取代市场上现有的重构工具。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to improve significantly the productivity of software developers in evolving large software systems. The proposed interactive refactoring Technology helps programmers to semi-automate the process of improving the quality of large-scale software projects by detecting, prioritizing and correcting design defects that affect the ease of both understanding and maintenance of the source code of software projects. In large-scale projects, programmers can spend at least 60% of their time in understanding the code. This interactive refactoring technology will significantly reduce that time which leads to higher productivity and much less software bugs. The proposed technology will allow programmers to meet high code quality standards when releasing a new software product and reduce software maintenance activities that can consume up to 90% of the total cost of a typical software project.This I-Corps project is to semi-automate the process of improving software quality by recommending refactoring changes, using computational search techniques, instead of the current manual refactoring tools support. Manual refactoring is error-prone, time consuming and not useful for radical refactoring that requires extensive application of changes to correct unhealthy code. This technology formalizes software refactoring as a dynamic interactive optimization framework that provides refactoring-centric interaction, enables refactoring and development to proceed in parallel and collects interactive information in a non-intrusive manner that can be used to inform dynamically the refactoring process. This technology recommends ways to make code quality easy to estimate, improve, evolve and reason about. The proposed refactoring technology has been successfully used by active programmers in both open source and industrial projects. Based on the high performance and low cost of the interactive refactoring technology, it may replace the current refactoring tools in the marketplace.