research-article

Refactoring with synthesis

Authors:

Veselin Raychev,

Manu Sridharan,

Martin VechevAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 48, Issue 10

Pages 339 - 354

https://doi.org/10.1145/2544173.2509544

Published: 29 October 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Refactoring has become an integral part of modern software development, with wide support in popular integrated development environments (IDEs). Modern IDEs provide a fixed set of supported refactorings, listed in a refactoring menu. But with IDEs supporting more and more refactorings, it is becoming increasingly difficult for programmers to discover and memorize all their names and meanings. Also, since the set of refactorings is hard-coded, if a programmer wants to achieve a slightly different code transformation, she has to either apply a (possibly non-obvious) sequence of several built-in refactorings, or just perform the transformation by hand.

We propose a novel approach to refactoring, based on synthesis from examples, which addresses these limitations. With our system, the programmer need not worry how to invoke individual refactorings or the order in which to apply them. Instead, a transformation is achieved via three simple steps: the programmer first indicates the start of a code refactoring phase; then she performs some of the desired code changes manually; and finally, she asks the tool to complete the refactoring.

Our system completes the refactoring by first extracting the difference between the starting program and the modified version, and then synthesizing a sequence of refactorings that achieves (at least) the desired changes. To enable scalable synthesis, we introduce local refactorings, which allow for first discovering a refactoring sequence on small program fragments and then extrapolating it to a full refactoring sequence.

We implemented our approach as an Eclipse plug-in, with an architecture that is easily extendable with new refactorings. The experimental results are encouraging: with only minimal user input, the synthesizer was able to quickly discover complex refactoring sequences for several challenging realistic examples.

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Index Terms

Refactoring with synthesis
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Development frameworks and environments
      1. Integrated and visual development environments

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 48, Issue 10

OOPSLA '13

October 2013

867 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/2544173

Editor:
Mark W. Bailey
Hamilton College, Clinton, NY

Issue’s Table of Contents

OOPSLA '13: Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages & applications
October 2013
904 pages
ISBN:9781450323741
DOI:10.1145/2509136
Co-chair:
Antony Hosking
Purdue University, USA
,
General Chair:
Patrick Eugster
Purdue University, USA
,
Program Chair:
Cristina V. Lopes
University of California, Irvine, USA

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 29 October 2013

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 48, Issue 10

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https://doi.org/10.1109/TETCI.2023.3336920
Gupta PKhare ABajpai YChakraborty SGulwani SKanade ARadhakrishna ASoares GTiwari AChandra SBlincoe KTonella P(2023)Grace: Language Models Meet Code EditsProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616253(1483-1495)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3611643.3616253
Qi SLi YGao CSu XGao SZheng ZLiu C(2023)Dynamically Relative Position Encoding-Based Transformer for Automatic Code EditIEEE Transactions on Reliability10.1109/TR.2022.319437072:3(1147-1160)Online publication date: Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TR.2022.3194370
Bibiano AUchôa AAssunção WTenório DColanzi TVergilio SGarcia A(2023)Composite refactoring: Representations, characteristics and effects on software projectsInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2022.107134156(107134)Online publication date: Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2022.107134
Rahman MWatanobe YSzmeja PSowiński PPaprzycki MGanzha M(2023)Code Semantics Learning with Deep Neural Networks: An AI-Based Approach for Programming EducationComputational Science – ICCS 202310.1007/978-3-031-36030-5_57(737-750)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2023
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Chakraborty SDing YAllamanis MRay B(2022)CODIT: Code Editing With Tree-Based Neural ModelsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2020.302050248:4(1385-1399)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2022
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Golubev YKurbatova ZAlOmar EBryksin TMkaouer MSpinellis DGousios GChechik MDi Penta M(2021)One thousand and one stories: a large-scale survey of software refactoringProceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3468264.3473924(1303-1313)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2021
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Sousa LCedrim DGarcia AOizumi WBibiano AOliveira DKim MOliveira A(2020)Characterizing and Identifying Composite RefactoringsProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3379597.3387477(186-197)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2020
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