Refactoring Trip Advisor Survey

This page is set up to facilitate the testing and evaluation of Refactoring Trip Advisor. Refactoring Trip Advisor is an Eclipse Plug-in developed by the postgraduate student Theofanis Vartziotis and supervised by professor Apostolos Zarras. This tool aims to provide the developer with an overview of a wide range of software refactorings as well as the relationships that exist between them. The tool also provides with identification for refactoring opportunities on the developer’s code.

You can participate in this survey by following the next three steps. Install the plug-in, run the proposed tests to see how the tool actually works and finally fill out a simple questionnaire form.

1.  Installing the Refactoring Trip Advisor Eclipse plug-in.

• In order to install Refactoring Trip Advisor you first need to download it. A beta version for the purposes of this survey can be found here.
• The next step is to copy the .jar file under the ‘dropins’ folder on your Eclipse install’s directory. If there is a ‘plugins’ folder located under the ‘dropins’ folder, place the .jar file inside it. Otherwise create the ‘plugins’ folder yourself and then place the .jar file inside.
• Finally start Eclipse. If it’s already open, restart it. You can use Refactoring Trip Advisor by navigating Refactor->Trip Advisor from Eclipses main menu bar.
• In order to use Refactoring Trip Advisor and learn more about it, we provided you with an Eclipse project to run your tests on. The project can be found here.
• Once you have downloaded the project, unzip it so you can be able to import it on your Eclipse. To do so you should go to File->Import. On the opened “Import” window go to General->Existing Projects into Workspace. Finally browse to find the location of the project you downloaded and import it.

2. Using Refactoring Trip Advisor.

To successfully participate in this survey you are required to do the following two tasks. (Note: You do not need to compile and run any piece of code for both of the tasks).

1^st Task.

Before attempting the first task, you should get familiarized with refactoring if you have no idea about it. On the other hand, if you have some knowledge about refactoring you can start doing the task right away. A definition can be found here and the catalog of refactoring techniques can be found here.

• Locate and view the code of “ComplexityVisualizer.java” file. The file is located under the “visualizer” package on your project’s “src” folder.
• For this task you are called to simplify the visualizeComplexity() method by refactoring your code WITHOUT the help of Refactoring Trip Advisor.
• You are advised to monitor the different refactorings you performed as well as the time this task took you since you are going to be asked for them on Step 3 of the survey.

2^nd Task.

Before attempting the second task, you should learn how to actually use Refactoring trip Advisor. To do so you should read the help contents Refactoring Trip Advisor offers under the “Help” option on its main menu bar.

• Locate and view the code of “GrowthVisualizer.java” file. The file is located under the “visualizer” package on your project’s “src” folder.
• For this task you are called to simplify the visualizeGrowth() method by refactoring your code WITH  the help of Refactoring Trip Advisor.
• More specifically you should focus your attention on refactorings located inside the “Method Composition” region. Take advantage of the refactoring relationships as well as the detectors that Refactoring Trip Advisor provides. (Note: keep “GrowthVisualizer.java” selected on Eclipse’s Package Explorer before start detecting opportunities for a refactoring.)
• You are advised to monitor the different refactorings you performed as well as the time this task took you since you are going to be asked for them on Step 3 of the survey.

3. Filling out the survey form.

To complete the survey you must answer some multiple choice questions about your experience using Trip Advisor. The questionnaire form can be found here. (Note: You can answer the first section named ‘Software Developer Survey’ before you use Refactoring Trip Advisor if you want.)

For any further information or questions about this survey you can contact the developer of Refactoring Trip Advisor via email: tvartzio@cs.uoi.gr