Editable Replay of IDE-Based Repetitive Tasks

Programmers often have to do many repetitive tasks when using an IDE (integrated development environment). These tasks require them to navigate through many views and dialogs in the same steps and input same data, which are time consuming and boring. In this paper, we present an approach to automatically perform the repetitive tasks by catching user actions on the IDE and replaying them when necessary. The sequence and contents of the caught user actions can be edited for generating user actions of similar tasks. The user actions are manifested as a set of high-level information so that they are easy to be edited and robust to UI changes. We present SmartReplayer, an implementation of our approach in the Eclipse IDE and use examples to show that it can greatly improve efficiency of Eclipse Programmers.