Search-based refactoring: Towards semantics preservation

Authors:
Ali Ouni;Mohamed Salah Hamdi;Marouane Kessentini;Houari Sahraoui
Affiliations:
DIRO, Université de Montréal, Canada;Information Systems Department, Ahmed Ben Mohamed Military College, Qatar;CS, Missouri University of Science and Technology, USA;DIRO, Université de Montréal, Canada
Venue:
ICSM '12 Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM)
Year:
2012

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Abstract

Refactoring restructures a program to improve its structure without altering its behavior. However, it is challenging to preserve the domain semantics of a program when refactoring is decided/implemented automatically. Indeed, a program could be syntactically correct, have the right behavior, but model incorrectly the domain semantics. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective optimization approach to find the best sequence of refactorings that maximizes quality improvements (program structure) and minimizes semantic errors. To this end, we use the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) to find the best compromise between these two conflicting objectives. We report the results of our experiments on different open source projects.