Automated refactorings in Java using IntelliJ IDEA to extract and propogate constants

Refactoring tools suffer from usability in the areas of automating mundane tasks, providing user customization, and providing strategies for error recovery. The automation of refactoring tools can be a risky undertaking since user intervention is required in many scenarios to maintain the internal quality of the system. Any type of design level refactoring requires complex changes to the code, the validation of preconditions, and could potentially harm the system. Smaller refactorings that handle code-smells can be carried out automatically with considerably lower risk. This paper discusses the current state of automated refactoring tools, and the development of an automated refactoring tool to extract and propagate Java literal expressions in IntelliJ IDEA.