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%.
Dig et al. proposed a technique to detect refactorings performed during component evolution REF .
Automated detection of refactorings in evolving components
in Proceedings of the 20th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, 2006
Computer Science