RAID: Tool Support for Refactoring-Aware Code Reviews

Brito, Rodrigo; Valente, M.

doi:10.1109/icpc52881.2021.00033

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Consequently, we also claim the concept of composite refactoring can be used to improve the results of empirical software engineering studies on refactoring practices. Finally, our scripts and catalog can also help to improve the user experience provided by refactoring‐aware code review tools, 25 by supporting the detection of refactorings at a higher abstraction level.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Refactoring was already studied in scenarios such as code review, 19,25,37,38 code understanding, 32,39–41 and education 42,43 . However, these studies do not propose catalogs of refactorings operations to improve software practices.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Techniques that may benefit from the detection of independent refactorings (like code visualization, [12][13][14] code review, [15][16][17][18][19] code authorship, 20,21 bug-introducing detection, 22,23 refactoring-aware tools, 24,25 software mining approaches, [26][27][28][29] to name a few) may also benefit from the detection of composite refactorings. As refactoring detection is the basis of such techniques, composite refactorings would bring to light novel operations not restricted to time and scope, therefore better representing the actual source code changes.…”

Section: An Example Of Composite Refactoringmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Towards a catalog of composite refactorings

Brito

Hora

Valente

2023

J Software Evolu Process

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Catalogs of refactoring have key importance in software maintenance and evolution, since developers rely on such documents to understand and perform refactoring operations. Furthermore, these catalogs constitute a reference guide for communication between practitioners since they standardize a common refactoring vocabulary. Fowler's book describes the most popular catalog of refactorings, which documents single and well‐known refactoring operations. However, sometimes, refactorings are composite transformations, that is, a sequence of refactorings is performed over a given program element. For example, a sequence of Extract Method operations (a single refactoring) can be performed over the same method, in one or in multiple commits, to simplify its implementation, therefore, leading to a Method Decomposition operation (a composite refactoring). In this paper, we propose and document a catalog with eight composite refactorings. We also implement a set of scripts to mine composite refactorings by preprocessing the results of refactoring detection tools. Using such scripts, we search for composites in a representative refactoring oracle with hundreds of confirmed single refactoring operations. Next, to complement this first study, we also search for composites in the full history of 10 well‐known open‐source projects. We characterize the detected composite refactorings, under dimensions such as size and location. We conclude by addressing the applications and implications of the proposed catalog.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: An Example Of Composite Refactoringmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Towards a catalog of composite refactorings

Brito

Hora

Valente

2023

J Software Evolu Process

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“…The evaluation of the tool showed that it can detect behavior-changing refactorings with high precision (92%) and recall (94%). RAID [79] aims at reducing the reviewers' cognitive effort by automatically detecting refactorings and visualizing information relevant for the refactoring to the reviewer. In a field experiment, professional developers reduced the number of lines they had to review for move and extraction refactorings.…”

Section: Mcr Themes and Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modern Code Reviews—Survey of Literature and Practice

Badampudi

Unterkalmsteiner

Britto

2023

ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.

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Background: Modern Code Review (MCR) is a lightweight alternative to traditional code inspections. While secondary studies on MCR exist; it is unknown whether the research community has targeted themes that practitioners consider important. Objectives: The objectives are to provide an overview of MCR research, analyze the practitioners’ opinions on the importance of MCR research, investigate the alignment between research and practice, and propose future MCR research avenues. Method: We conducted a systematic mapping study to survey state-of-the-art until and including 2021, employed the Q-Methodology to analyze the practitioners’ perception of the relevance of MCR research, and analyzed the primary studies’ research impact. Results: We analyzed 244 primary studies, resulting in five themes. As a result of the 1300 survey data points, we found that the respondents are positive about research investigating the impact of MCR on product quality and MCR process properties. In contrast, they are negative about human factor- and support systems-related research. Conclusion: These results indicate a misalignment between the state-of-the-art and the themes deemed important by most survey respondents. Researchers should focus on solutions that can improve the state of MCR practice. We provide an MCR research agenda, which can potentially increase the impact of MCR research.

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“…Their goal is to help developers analyze changes in the source code before integrating them into the base code. Often, such comparison tools present code changes using split or unified views [8], [11], [14], [33]. These views are adopted by popular tools such as GitHub [12], a widely used repository hub for code version control using Git.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Eye-Tracking Study on the Use of Split/Unified Code Change Views for Bug Detection

Alcocer,

Cossio-Chavalier,

Rojas-Stambuk

et al. 2023

IEEE Access

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To address a bug detection task, developers often compare two versions of source code. Comparison tools support this task by showing both versions of the code in a split view or unified way. However, there is still little knowledge of how developers interact with code comparison tools during a source code change analysis task. Therefore, the strengths and weaknesses of each approach remain unknown. To address this research gap, we investigate their usefulness, limitations, and potential room for improvement. To this end, we conducted a user study involving 12 participants who analyzed the source code in two commits to detect bugs. In the study, we adopted a within-subjects approach. Each participant addressed similar tasks using the split and unified views of GitHub while using an eye-tracking device. We found that participants experienced less visual effort when using the unified view. The results suggest that a lower effort can promote a deeper analysis of the code, which often leads to the detection of more bugs. We also observed that participants predominantly looked at conditionals, class/instance variables, and code changes. However, we did not find statistically significant differences among the variables analyzed when using split or unified views. We consider the results of the study to be relevant to practitioners and researchers alike. Practitioners will be informed when choosing a view, while researchers will identify opportunities to improve code comparison tools.INDEX TERMS bug detection, code review, eye-tracking, user study

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RAID: Tool Support for Refactoring-Aware Code Reviews

Cited by 7 publications

References 42 publications

Towards a catalog of composite refactorings

Towards a catalog of composite refactorings

Modern Code Reviews—Survey of Literature and Practice

An Eye-Tracking Study on the Use of Split/Unified Code Change Views for Bug Detection

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