RefFinder

Template-based Reconstruction of Complex Refactorings

Website for Ref-Finder Tool Demo

Summary of RefFinder

RefFinder identifies complex refactorings between two program versions using a template-based refactoring reconstruction approach---RefFinder expresses each refactoring type in terms of template logic rules and uses a logic programming engine to infer concrete refactoring instances. It currently supports sixty three refactoring types from Fowler's catalog, showing the most comprehensive coverage among existing techniques.

Team

This project is developed by Professor Miryung Kim's Software Engineering and Analysis Laboratory at UCLA. If you encounter any problems, please open an issue or feel free to contact us:

Miryung Kim: Professor at UCLA, miryung@cs.ucla.edu;

How to cite

Please refer to our ICSM '10 research paper, Template-based Reconstruction of Complex Refactorings for more details.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{inproceedings,
	author = {Kim, Miryung and Gee, Matthew and Loh, Alex and Rachatasumrit, Napol},
	year = {2010},
	month = {01},
	pages = {371-372},
	title = {Ref-Finder: A refactoring reconstruction tool based on logic query templates},
	journal = {Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering},
	doi = {10.1145/1882291.1882353}
}

Usage

Tool Demo: Ref-Finder: a Refactoring Reconstruction Tool based on Logic Query Templates, Miryung Kim, Matthew Gee, Alex Loh, and Napol Rachatasumrit, FSE' 10

Here is an example on how to use Ref-Finder jar file to identify refactorings.

import edu.utexas.seal.reffinder.Application; ...
public class YourRefFinderView extends ViewPart {
  public void createPartControl(Composite p) {
    Application refFinder = new Application();
    try {
	refFinder.myStart(projOrig, projDelta, null);
	String xmlFilePath = projDelta.getLocation().toOSString()+System.getProperty("file.separator") +"RefList.xml";
	XmlReader xml = new XmlReader(xmlFilePath);
	//please refer to XmlReader and XMLOutput for more details
    } catch (Exception e1) {}

Step 1: Create your own Eclipse Plugin Project, import RefFinder_1.0.0.jar to classpath

Step 2: Create a Viewer and invoke myStart(IProject projectA, IProject projectB, String pathOutput)

Step 3: Parse the XML output from Ref-Finder.

Extend Ref-Finder

You may want to start exploring from lsclipse/RefactoringQuery.java. Please check docs folder for syntax guide, etc.

Dataset for ICSM'10

Please check inspect_dataset.

Ref-Distiller

A extension of Ref-Finder that we are actively working on.

Website for Ref-Distiller

Manual refactoring edits are error prone, as refactoring requires developers to coordinate related transformations and understand the complex inter-relationship between affected files, variables, and methods. We propose RefDistiller, an approach for improving detection of manual refactoring anomalies by two combined strategies. First, it uses a predefined template to identify potential missed refactoring edits---omission anomalies. Second, it leverages an automated refactoring engine to separate behavior-preserving edits from behavior-modifying edits---commission anomalies. We evaluate its effectiveness on a data set with one hundred manual refactoring bugs. These bugs are hard to detect because they do not produce any compilation errors nor are caught by the pre- and post-condition checking of many existing refactoring engines. RefDistiller is able to identify 97% of the erroneous edits, of which 24% are not detected by the given test suites.

Reference: Everton L. G. Alves , Myoungkyu Song , Miryung Kim, RefDistiller: a refactoring aware code review tool for inspecting manual refactoring edits, FSE'14

LSDiff

Ref-Finder is built on LSDiff and we have open-sourced LSDiff and LS-EclipsePlugin