Evaluating software refactoring tool support

Up to 75% of the costs associated with the development of software systems occur post-deployment during maintenance and evolution. Software refactoring is a process that can significantly reduce the costs associated with software evolution. Refactoring is defined as internal modification of source code to improve system quality, without change to observable behaviour. Tool support for software refactoring attempts to further reduce evolution costs by automating manual, error-prone and tedious tasks. Although the process of refactoring is well-defined, tools supporting refactoring do not support the full process. Existing tools suffer from issues associated with the level of automation, the stages of the refactoring process supported or automated, the subset of refactorings that can be applied, and complexity of the supported refactorings. This paper presents a framework for evaluating software refactoring tool support based on the DESMET method. For the DESMET application, a functional analysis of the requirements for supporting software refactoring is used in conjunction with a case study. This evaluation was completed to assess the support provided by six Java refactoring tools and to evaluate the efficacy of using the DESMET method for evaluating refactoring tools.