TitleAutomated support for program refactoring using invariants
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2001
AuthorsKataoka Y, Ernst MD, Griswold WG, Notkin D
Conference NameICSM 2001: Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance
Pagination736–743
Date or Month PublishedNovember
Conference LocationFlorence, Italy
AbstractProgram refactoring\,–-\,transforming a program to improve readability, structure, performance, abstraction, maintainability, or other characteristics\,–-\,is not applied in practice as much as might be desired. One deterrent is the cost of detecting candidates for refactoring and of choosing the appropriate refactoring transformation. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of automatically finding places in the program that are candidates for specific refactorings. The approach uses program invariants: when particular invariants hold at a program point, a specific refactoring is applicable. Since most programs lack explicit invariants, an invariant detection tool called Daikon is used to infer the required invariants. We developed an invariant pattern matcher for several common refactorings and applied it to an existing Java code base. Numerous refactorings were detected, and one of the developers of the code base assessed their efficacy.
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Citation KeyKataokaEGN01