RefDistiller: a refactoring aware code review tool for inspecting manual refactoring edits

Alves, Everton L. G.; Song, Myoungkyu; Kim, Miryung

doi:10.1145/2635868.2661674

Cited by 27 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…As future work for improving PRI's approach and tool, we intend to (1) create pattern templates for more refactoring types, (2) provide tool support for more refactoring types for fixing anomalies, and (3) implement checking operations to determine the correctness of extra edits to pure refactoring versions by extending a prior work . We also plan to conduct more user studies with professional developers to improve PRI's usability in industry‐scale settings.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent work on refactoring‐aware code reviews addresses the problem of manually conducting refactorings and proposes a code review tool that detects behavior changes in refactoring edits . However, PRI focuses on managing clone refactorings of clone groups and the consistent evolution and detecting incomplete refactorings as potential anomalies.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Clone refactoring inspection by summarizing clone refactorings and detecting inconsistent changes during software evolution

Chen

Kwon

Song

2018

J Software Evolu Process

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It has been broadly assumed that removing code clones by refactorings would solve the problems of code duplication. Despite recent empirical studies on the benefit of refactorings, contradicting evidence shows that it is often difficult or impossible to remove clones by using standard refactoring techniques. Developers cannot easily determine which clones can be refactored or how they should be maintained scattered throughout a large code base in evolving systems. We propose pattern‐based clone refactoring inspection (PRI), a technique for managing clone refactorings. PRI summarizes refactorings of clones and detects clones that are not consistently refactored. To help developers refactor these anomalies, PRI also visualizes clone evolution and refactorings and fixes refactoring anomalies to prevent the clone group from being left in an inconsistent state. We evaluated PRI on 6 open‐source projects and showed that it identifies clone refactorings with 94.1% accuracy and detects inconsistent refactorings with 98.4% accuracy, tracking clone change histories. In a study with 10 student developers, the participants reported that flexible PRI's summarization and detection features can be valuable for novice developers to learn about refactorings to clones. These results show that PRI should improve developer productivity in inspecting clone refactorings distributed across multiple files in evolving systems.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clone refactoring inspection by summarizing clone refactorings and detecting inconsistent changes during software evolution

Chen

Kwon

Song

2018

J Software Evolu Process

Self Cite

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“…Refactoring has been extensively studied over the past few decades [47], with recent work focusing on the detection of refactoring changes and the relationship between refactorings and code quality [48], [49], [50], [51]. Multiple tools have been developed to detect different refactoring types, such as Ref-Finder [52] and RefDistiller [53]. We use the state-of-the-art refactoring detection tool, RefactoringMiner, which achieves a precision of 98% and a recall of 87% [23].…”

Section: Proactive Conflict Detection and Preventionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Systematic Comparison of Two Refactoring-aware Merging Techniques

Ellis¹,

Nadi²,

Dig³

2021

Preprint

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Dealing with merge conflicts in version control systems is a challenging task for software developers. Resolving merge conflicts is a time-consuming and error-prone process, which distracts developers from important tasks. Recent work shows that refactorings are often involved in merge conflicts and that refactoring-related conflicts tend to be larger, making them harder to resolve. In the literature, there are two refactoring-aware merging techniques that claim to automatically resolve refactoring-related conflicts; however, these two techniques have never been empirically compared. In this paper, we present RefMerge, a Java re-implementation of the first technique, which is an operation-based refactoring-aware merging algorithm. We compare RefMerge to Git and the state-of-the-art graph-based refactoring-aware merging tool, IntelliMerge, on 2,001 merge scenarios with refactoring-related conflicts from 20 open-source projects. We find that RefMerge completely resolves 143 (7%) merge scenarios while IntelliMerge resolves only 78 (4%). We additionally conduct a qualitative analysis of the differences between the three merging algorithms and provide insights of the strengths and weaknesses of each tool.

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“…It would be interesting to verify whether such unexpected results can correlate with the developer's experience. Along with hindering design quality, the misuse of refactoring can also be responsible for bugs 86,87 , and various studies have proposed testing strategies to make refactoring safer 34,88 . One of our future directions is to also correlate the bug-proneness of refactorings with the degree of expertise of the contributors.…”

Section: Research Implications and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Relationship Between Developer Experience and Refactoring

AlOmar

Peruma

Newman

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops

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Refactoring is widely recognized as one of the efficient techniques to manage technical debt and maintain a healthy software project through enforcing best design practices, or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have shown that code refactoring activities are mainly executed by developers who have sufficient knowledge of the system's design, and disposing of leadership roles in their development teams. However, these surveys were mainly limited to specific projects and companies. In this paper, we explore the generalizability of the previous results by analyzing 800 open-source projects. We mine their refactoring activities, and we identify their corresponding contributors. Then, we associate an experience score to each contributor in order to test various hypotheses related to whether developers with higher scores tend to 1) perform a higher number of refactoring operations 2) exhibit different motivations behind their refactoring, and 3) better document their refactoring activity. We found that (1) although refactoring is not restricted to a subset of developers, those with higher contribution score tend to perform more refactorings than others; (2) while there is no correlation between experience and motivation behind refactoring, top contributed developers are found to perform a wider variety of refactoring operations, regardless of their complexity; and (3) top contributed developer tend to document less their refactoring activity. Our qualitative analysis of three randomly sampled projects show that the developers who are responsible for the majority of refactoring activities are typically in advanced positions in their development teams, demonstrating their extensive knowledge of the design of the systems they contribute to.

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RefDistiller: a refactoring aware code review tool for inspecting manual refactoring edits

Cited by 27 publications

References 13 publications

Clone refactoring inspection by summarizing clone refactorings and detecting inconsistent changes during software evolution

Clone refactoring inspection by summarizing clone refactorings and detecting inconsistent changes during software evolution

A Systematic Comparison of Two Refactoring-aware Merging Techniques

On the Relationship Between Developer Experience and Refactoring

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