Automated detection of api refactorings in libraries

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

REFERENCES

• 1: Giuliano Antoniol , Massimiliano Di Penta , Ettore Merlo, An Automatic Approach to identify Class Evolution Discontinuities, Proceedings of the Principles of Software Evolution, 7th International Workshop, p.31-40, September 06-07, 2004 [doi>10.1109/IWPSE.2004.4]
• 2: A. Broder, On the Resemblance and Containment of Documents, Proceedings of the Compression and Complexity of Sequences 1997, p.21, June 11-13, 1997
• 3: Serge Demeyer , Stéphane Ducasse , Oscar Nierstrasz, Finding refactorings via change metrics, Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.166-177, October 2000, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
• 4: D. Dig, C. Comertoglu, D. Marinov, and R. Johnson. Automatic detection of refactorings in evolving components. In Proc. ECOOP'06, pages 404--428.
• 5: Danny Dig , Ralph Johnson, How do APIs evolve? A story of refactoring: Research Articles, Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice, v.18 n.2, p.83-107, March 2006 [doi>10.1002/smr.v18:2]
• 6: Michael W. Godfrey , Lijie Zou, Using Origin Analysis to Detect Merging and Splitting of Source Code Entities, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.31 n.2, p.166-181, February 2005 [doi>10.1109/TSE.2005.28]
• 7: Code Conventions for the Java Programming Language. http://java.sun.com/docs/codeconv/html/CodeConvTOC.doc.html, Apr. 1999.
• 8: JavaWordNet Library. http://sourceforge.net/projects/jwordnet.
• 9: Sunghun Kim , Kai Pan , E. James Whitehead, Jr., When Functions Change Their Names: Automatic Detection of Origin Relationships, Proceedings of the 12th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, p.143-152, November 07-11, 2005 [doi>10.1109/WCRE.2005.33]
• 10: C. J. Van Rijsbergen, Information Retrieval, Butterworth-Heinemann, Newton, MA, 1979
• 11: Filip Van Rysselberghe , Serge Demeyer, Reconstruction of Successful Software Evolution Using Clone Detection, Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution, p.126, September 01-02, 2003
• 12: Peter Weissgerber , Stephan Diehl, Identifying Refactorings from Source-Code Changes, Proceedings of the 21st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, p.231-240, September 18-22, 2006 [doi>10.1109/ASE.2006.41]
• 13: Zhenchang Xing , Eleni Stroulia, Refactoring Detection based on UMLDiff Change-Facts Queries, Proceedings of the 13th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, p.263-274, October 23-27, 2006 [doi>10.1109/WCRE.2006.48]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.13 Reusable Software
            Subjects: Reusable libraries

General Terms:
Design, Management

Keywords:
code reuse, libraries, refactoring, software maintainance