Conclusion

ChatGPT is a new form of technology that will allow society to expand in all directions: education, technology, etc. Therefore, it is essential that we understand what it is capable of and what its limitations are. Through this project, we were able to better understand ChatGPT’s code refactoring capabilities and limits in order to determine whether or not it can be useful to society. Based on our findings for RQ1 and RQ2, we can conclude that ChatGPT is able to refactor and preserve the behavior of the code. This portrays that developers can use ChatGPT to take existing code and refactor it to improve its quality and other attributes. Also, based on our findings for RQ3, it is evident that ChatGPT can properly identify the intent, instructions, and impact of a refactored code segment when given the original to compare it to. While ChatGPT was not always able to recognize the improvement of the quality attribute that the code was refactored for, improvements for numerous quality attributes were always made. However, ChatGPT is not perfect. Despite the fact that the same prompt was used by each author, we did end up getting different results from ChatGPT. These unpredictable outcomes made it difficult to truly figure out whether or not ChatGPT was capable of understanding the task we gave it. Overall,  ChatGPT was able to refactor most of the code provided. It was also able to preserve the behaviors of these codes. ChatGPT’s capabilities have yet to be discovered. With a better understanding of what it is capable of, the better we will be able to understand whether or not ChatGPT will allow society to expand.