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International Conference on Computer Supported Education

CSEDU 2019: Computer Supported Education pp 236–261Cite as

RefacTutor: An Interactive Tutoring System for Software Refactoring

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Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1220))

Abstract

While software refactoring is considered important to manage software complexity, it is often perceived as difficult and risky by software developers and thus neglected in practice. In this article, we present refacTutor, an interactive tutoring system for promoting software developers’ practical competences in software refactoring. The tutoring system provides immediate feedback to the users regarding the quality of the software design and the functional correctness of the (modified) source code. In particular, after each code modification (refactoring step), the user can review the results of run-time regression tests and compare the actual software design (as-is) with the targeted design (to-be) in order to check quality improvement. For this purpose, structural and behavioral diagrams of the Unified Modeling Language (UML2) representing the as-is software design are automatically reverse-engineered from source code. The to-be UML design diagrams can be pre-specified by the instructor. To demonstrate the technical feasibility of the approach, we provide a browser-based software prototype in Java accompanied by a collection of exercise examples. Moreover, we specify a viewpoint model for software refactoring, allocate exercises to competence levels and describe an exemplary path for teaching and training.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Sect. 3. The software prototype is available for download from http://refactoringgames.com/refactutor.

  2. 2.

    This workflow is supported by refacTutor; see Sect. 3 and Fig. 4 in particular.

  3. 3.

    The software prototype is available for download from http://refactoringgames.com/refactutor.

  4. 4.

    http://refactoringgames.com/refactutor.

  5. 5.

    Besides the two described types of exercises, multiple other scenarios can be designed by varying the values of the exercise aspects and views (see Table 1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Information Systems and New Media, Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna), Vienna, Austria

    Thorsten Haendler, Gustaf Neumann & Fiodor Smirnov

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  1. Thorsten Haendler
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  2. Gustaf Neumann
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Correspondence to Thorsten Haendler .

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  1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    H. Chad Lane

  2. Anderson Academic Commons, University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA

    Susan Zvacek

  3. School of Engineering, University of Ulster, Newtownabbey, UK

    James Uhomoibhi

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Haendler, T., Neumann, G., Smirnov, F. (2020). RefacTutor: An Interactive Tutoring System for Software Refactoring. In: Lane, H.C., Zvacek, S., Uhomoibhi, J. (eds) Computer Supported Education. CSEDU 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1220. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58459-7_12

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