I\'m interested mostly in C++ and method/class name/signature automatic changes.
I totally agree that find-and-replace work fine. However , a really nice feature of cedet is 'semantic-symref-list'.
With the cursor on a method, run this command, and you will be presented with a buffer that lists all of the places in your code that reference this tag.
You can still use find-and-replace tricks, and this will confirm that you have changed all the references.