Automated detection of refactorings in evolving components

  • Authors:

  • Danny Dig;Can Comertoglu;Darko Marinov;Ralph Johnson

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL;Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL;Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL;Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL

  • Venue:
  • ECOOP'06 Proceedings of the 20th European conference on Object-Oriented Programming
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

One of the costs of reusing software components is updating applications to use the new version of the components. Updating an application can be error-prone, tedious, and disruptive of the development process. Our previous study showed that more than 80% of the disruptive changes in five different components were caused by refactorings. If the refactorings that happened between two versions of a component could be automatically detected, a refactoring tool could replay them on applications. We present an algorithm that detects refactorings performed during component evolution. Our algorithm uses a combination of a fast syntactic analysis to detect refactoring candidates and a more expensive semantic analysis to refine the results. The experiments on components ranging from 17 KLOC to 352 KLOC show that our algorithm detects refactorings in real-world components with accuracy over 85%.