Mass refactoring

Context

Learned in this study

Things to explore

• How to properly build a PR since refactoring can have a major impact on the code?
• What are the reasons against code refactoring?
  • Applying refactoring that go against the developers coding guidelines
• Is it possible for two automated agents (a refactorer and a verifier) to exchange refactoring changes without the need for human intervention?

Overview

Procedure

• Scan github.com for a list of projects in your target language, possibly starting with the most popular projects
• Automatically clone many projects to one or many machines
• Apply all refactoring supported by your refactoring tools
• Create a commit per semantic change
• Create a commit with all the changes
• Obtain the amount of code added/removed and compute how much impact the refactoring would have on the project
• Automatically submit a pull request to the projects, indicating the refactoring that was applied

See also

References