Implementation of a user interface for the monitoring of a refactoring bot

Abstract

The Refactoring-Bot automatically removes code smells by refactoring the source code and creates pull requests with the changes on GitHub. However, the process of configuring the bot isn’t very user-friendly and it’s not possible to monitor the bot comfortably. In this paper, we introduce the implementation of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for the Refactoring-Bot in which you can easily manage configurations to start refactorings with the Sonar-Qube Analysis Service and monitor the pull requests of your designated bot user in a specific GitHub repository. The GUI communicates with the Representational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interface (API) of the Refactoring-Bot to exchange all the data which are needed to present it to the user. Then we evaluate the usability of the GUI by conducting a usability test, asking the participants to perform specific tasks while we take notes their behaviour and interaction with the service to find possible usability issues. Our findings show that the implemented product is easy-to-use and provides a high usability which results in a satisfying experience.