Refactoring Tutor: An IDE Integrated Tool for Practicing Key Techniques to Refactor Code

Refactoring code is an important skill to become a competent software engineer, however it is usually never explicitly taught in coding intensive courses. Even though engineers in academia and industry agree refactoring is important, most novice programmers are unaware of the code smells they should avoid when writing code. This thesis discusses a novel tutoring system to assist novice programmers with refactoring. This tool provides refactoring exercises to students in an introductory programming class. The tutor exposes students to various types of code smells and has them deliberately practice how to refactor. The tutor infrastructure has proven to be robust to several refactoring exercises. Based on a user study involving the students and the staff members from 6.1010: Fundamentals of Programming, the tutor infrastructure has shown to be robust to bugs and staff feedback. The tutor shows promise, but further studies with more students are necessary to evaluate its effectiveness on teaching student refactoring.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Leyva, Mario

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Miller, Robert C.

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/151544

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/151544