Automated detection of api refactorings in libraries

  • Authors:

  • Kunal Taneja;Danny Dig;Tao Xie

  • Affiliations:

  • North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC;University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL;North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the twenty-second IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Software developers often do not build software from scratch but reuse software libraries. In theory, the APIs of a library should be stable, but in practice they do change and thus require changes in software that reuses the library. Our previous study of five reusable components shows that more than 80% of these API changes are caused by refactorings. If these refactorings could be automatically detected, they could be used to automatically upgrade applications. In this paper, we present a technique and its supporting tool, RefacLib, to automatically detect refactorings in libraries. RefacLib uses syntactic analysis in the first phase to quickly detect refactoring candidates across two versions of a library. In the second phase, RefacLib uses various heuristics to refine the results. We used RefacLib to detect refactorings in five open source libraries and frameworks. The experiments show that RefacLib can process realistic code bases and detects refactorings with practical accuracy