Description Mohsen Vakilian 2011-11-08 18:53:50 EST

Build Identifier: 20100617-1415

Sometimes, refactorings such as rename report the following warning message to the user:

"Code modification may not be accurate as affected resource ‘resource name’ has compile errors."

However, programmers often ignore the above warning message. We have recently conducted an empirical study on the use of Eclipse refactoring tool using our custom data collector called CodingSpectator <http://codingspectator.cs.illinois.edu/>. Our participants received the above warning message for a total of 79 times and performed the refactoring 94% of the time. The warning message is so frequent and provides so little information that our participants did not find it useful and ignored it most of the time. See the technical report of our study for more information <http://hdl.handle.net/2142/27730>.

Is there a way to reduce the number of false alarms, i.e. is it possible to reduce the number of times the above warning is presented to the user even though the refactoring was performed correctly? Is it possible to make the message more specific? For example, is it possible to list the methods, compilation units, or packages that the refactoring might have changed incorrectly because of their compilation problems?

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
If you use the rename refactoring to rename field "a" to "c" in the following program, the refactoring tool will report the warning message: "Code modification may not be accurate as affected resource ‘resource name’ has compile errors."

class C {

	int a;
	
	void m() {
		a = 1;
	}

	void n() {
		b = 0; //compilation problem: b is not declared.
	}
	
}