Trustworthy Refactoring via Decomposition and Schemes: A Complex Case Study

Horpácsi, Dániel; Kőszegi, Judit

doi:10.4204/eptcs.253.8

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Even though aiming for language independence, the refactoring framework briefly introduced in Section 3 [8] was developed having Erlang as its target language. The main motivation behind this paper is to recreate the existing framework for a significantly different target language, ultimately achieving another step towards making it more language-agnostic.…”

Section: Adapting the Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Please note that we do not consider the chosen refactoring and the resulting scheme instances as main contributions of this paper. They rather provide only a base for the presented adaptation process of the language discussed in [9] and [8] to OOP. Constructing a refined and widely usable scheme library for Java is still a future work of ours -see Section 6 for details.…”

Section: Case Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Related work offer numerous candidates. For example, we could pick generalize function from [8] or extract method from [15]. Although on these we could illustrate the concept of decomposition, none of them depend heavily enough on object-oriented abstractions.…”

Section: The Base Refactoringmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An existing domain-specific language, explained in Section 3, makes it possible to formalize automatically verifiable refactorings via instantiating predefined transformation schemes with conditional term rewrite rules [9,8]. This language was constructed for refactorings mainly on Erlang and the functional programming paradigm.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Adaptation of a Refactoring DSL for the Object-Oriented Paradigm

2021

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Many development environments offer refactorings aimed at improving non-functional properties of software, but we have no guarantees that these transformations indeed preserve the observable behavior of the source code they are applied on. An existing domain-specific language makes it possible to formalize automatically verifiable refactorings via instantiating predefined transformation schemes with conditional term rewrite rules. We present a proposal for adapting this language from the functional to the object-oriented programming paradigm, using Java instead of Erlang as a representative. The behavior-preserving property of discussed refactorings is characterized with a multilayered definition of equivalence for Java programs, including the conformity relation of class hierarchies. Based on the decomposition of a complex refactoring rule, we show how new transformation schemes can be identified, along with modifications and extensions of the description language required to accommodate them. Finally, we formally define the chosen base refactoring as a composition of scheme instances.

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Section: Adapting the Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Case Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Base Refactoringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Adaptation of a Refactoring DSL for the Object-Oriented Paradigm

2021

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“…Some of the previously built complex refactoring tools were solidly developed, but not totally accurate in guaranteeing the correctness of the transformation these tools implement, which have resulted in introducing bugs to the system. In order to solve this problem, Horpácsi et al [46] propose to decompose complex refactoring transformation into a series of prime refactorings that can also be expressed as instances of refactoring schemes, and then verified based on formal program semantics. This way, the transformations become simple and more easily verified.…”

Section: Refactoring Formalisms and Techniquesmentioning

confidence: 99%

On Preserving the Behavior in Software Refactoring: A Systematic Mapping Study

AlOmar¹,

Mkaouer²,

Newman³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Context: Refactoring is the art of modifying the design of a system without altering its behavior. The idea is to reorganize variables, classes and methods to facilitate their future adaptations and comprehension. As the concept of behavior preservation is fundamental for refactoring, several studies, using formal verification, language transformation and dynamic analysis, have been proposed to monitor the execution of refactoring operations and their impact on the program semantics. However, there is no existing study that examines the available behavior preservation strategies for each refactoring operation. Objective: This paper identifies behavior preservation approaches in the research literature. Method: We conduct, in this paper, a systematic mapping study, to capture all existing behavior preservation approaches that we classify based on several criteria including their methodology, applicability, and their degree of automation. Results:The results indicate that several behavior preservation approaches have been proposed in the literature. The approaches vary between using formalisms and techniques, developing automatic refactoring safety tools, and performing a manual analysis of the source code. Conclusion: Our taxonomy reveals that there exist some types of refactoring operations whose behavior preservation is under-researched. Our classification also indicates that several possible strategies can be combined to better detect any violation of the program semantics.

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