Continuous quality assessment with inCode

In spite of the progress that has been made over the last ten years in the research fields of software evolution and quality assessment, developers still do not take full advantage of the benefits of new assessment techniques that have been proposed by researchers. Beyond social factors, we believe that there are at least two main elements that contribute to this lack of adoption: (i) the insufficient integration of existing techniques in mainstream IDEs and (ii) the lack of support for a continuous (daily) usage of QA tools. In this context this paper introduces inCode, an Eclipse plugin aimed at transforming quality assessment and code inspections from a standalone activity, into a continuous process, fully integrated in the development life-cycle. But inCode not only assesses continuously the quality of Java systems; it also assists developers in taking restructuring decisions, and even supports them in triggering non-standard, complex refactorings. This paper introduces inCode's differentiating features, it presents the design goals that shaped our construction decisions, and describes a controlled experiment designed to validate the usability of the tool. The experiment has indicated that developers using inCode are more efficient in refactoring design fragments affected by design flaws.