Programmers often have to do many repetitive tasks when using an IDE (Integrated Development Environment). These tasks require them to navigate through many views and dialogs in the same steps and input same data, which are time consuming and boring. In this paper, we present an approach to automatically perform the repetitive tasks by catching user actions on the IDE and replaying them when necessary. The sequence and contents of the caught user actions can be edited for generating user actions of similar tasks. The user actions are manifested as a set of high-level information so that they are easy to be edited and robust to UI changes. We present SmartReplayer, an implementation of our approach in the Eclipse IDE and use examples to show that it can greatly improve efficiency of Eclipse Programmers.
Eclipse automates programming-related tasks through wizards. However, as creating a wizard requires a lot of work, the automation is limited on common tasks. In this paper, we propose an automated approach to wizard generation by recording and mining user actions. We record the actions of users in background and learn the common steps of performing tasks by machine learning approach. After that, we synthesize the mined information to generate a wizard automatically. In this way we can generate wizards not only for common tasks but also user-specific tasks. We have implemented our approach as an Eclipse plugin and have evaluated its effectiveness by comparing with existing Eclipse wizards.
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