Balancing Competing Needs of Machine and Human

Successful software must evolve to remain relevant, but this process of evolution can cause the software design to decay and lead to significantly reduced productivity and even canceled projects. Several studies show that developers are postponing software maintenance activities that improve software quality, even while seeking high-quality source code for themselves when updating existing projects. One reason is that time and money pressures force developers to neglect improving the quality of their source code. However, a more fundamental reason is that there is little scientific understanding of how developers restructure/refactor source code for the purpose of improving program quality, which limits the support that researchers can offer developers. In fact, developers often need to make trade-offs between code quality, available resources and delivering a product on time, and such management support is beyond the scope and capability of existing refactoring engines. In addition, existing fully-automated techniques are under-utilized because of the lack of flexibility and worries about introducing bugs.