Investigation of a C++ refactoring tool (Master of Software Engineering)

Abstract

The practice of software refactoring has become a core issue in software engineering today. Continually improving the structure of a program, while preserving its observable behavior, extends the lifetime of a program and allows it to evolve to meet ever changing and increasingly demanding requirements. This manuscript describes a prototype for a tool, Automated Refactoring Tool (ART), which assists C++ developers in performing refactorings that improve the structure and readability of their code. The tool provides a C++ preprocessor along with a parser that generates a program database. The developer can then manipulate the program elements within the database to perform refactorings on the source code. The refactoring correctly updates the source code and preprocessing directives to reflect the developer's intentions and outputs the updated source code to disk. A simple GUI is provided that allows the developer to easily choose with program element to refactor.