Refactoring Boundary

We argue that the limit of the propagation of the heap effects of a source code modification is determined by the aliasing structure of method parameters in a trace of the method calls that cross a boundary which partitions the heap. Further, that this aliasing structure is sufficient to uniquely determine the state of the part of the heap which has not been affected. And we give a definition of what it means for a part of the heap to be unaffected by a source code modification. This can be used to determine the correctness of a refactoring

Identifying Overly Strong Conditions in Refactoring Implementations

Abstract-Each refactoring implementation must check a number of conditions to guarantee behavior preservation. However, specifying and checking them are difficult. Sometimes refactoring tool developers may define overly strong conditions that prevent useful behavior-preserving transformations to be performed. We propose an approach for identifying overly strong conditions in refactoring implementations. We automatically generate a number of programs as test inputs for refactoring implementations. Then, we apply the same refactoring to each test input using two different implementations, and compare both results. We use Safe Refactor to evaluate whether a transformation preserves behavior. We evaluated our approach in 10 kinds of refactorings for Java implemented by three tools: Eclipse and Netbeans, and the JastAdd Refactoring Tool (JRRT). In a sample of 42,774 transformations, we identified 17 and 7 kinds of overly strong conditions in Eclipse and JRRT, respectively

Towards Attribute Grammars for Metamodel Semantics

Of key importance for metamodelling are appropriate modelling formalisms. Most metamodelling languages permit the development of metamodels that specify tree-structured models enriched with semantics like constraints, references and operations, which extend the models to graphs. However, often the semantics of these semantic constructs is not part of the metamodel, i.e., it is unspeci ed. Therefore, we propose to reuse well-known compiler construction techniques to specify metamodel semantics. To be more precise, we present the application of reference attribute grammars (RAGs) for metamodel semantics and analyse commonalities and differences. Our focus is to pave the way for such a combination, by exemplifying why and how the metamodelling and attribute grammar (AG) world can be combined and by investigating a concrete example - the combination of the Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF) and JastAdd, an AG evaluator generator

Interactive Data Representation Migration: Exploiting Program Dependence to Aid Program Transformation

International audienceData representation migration is a program transformation that involves changing the type of a particular data structure, and then updating all of the operations that somehow depend on that data structure according to the new type. Changing the data representation can provide benefits such as improving efficiency and improving the quality of the computed results. Performing such a transformation is challenging, because it requires applying data-type specific changes to code fragments that may be widely scattered throughout the source code, connected by dataflow dependencies. Refactoring systems are typically sensitive to dataflow dependencies, but are not programmable with respect to the features of particular data types. Existing program transformation languages provide the needed flexibility, but do not concisely support reasoning about dataflow dependencies.To address the needs of data representation migration, we propose a new approach to program transformation that relies on a notion of semantic dependency: every transformation step propagates the transformation process onward to code that somehow depends on the transformed code. Our approach provides a declarative transformation-specification language, for expressing type-specific transformation rules. We further provide scoped rules, a mechanism for guiding rule application, and tags, a device for simple program analysis within our framework, to enable more powerful program transformations.We have implemented a prototype transformation system based on these ideas for C and C++ code and evaluate it against three example specifications, including vectorization, transformation of integers to big integers, and transformation of array-of-structures data types to structure-of-arrays format. Our evaluation shows that our approach can improve program performance and the precision of the computed results, and that it scales to programs of up to 3700 lines

Refactoring and representation independence for class hierarchies

AbstractRefactoring transformations are important for productivity and quality in software evolution. Modular reasoning about semantics preserving transformations is difficult even in typed class-based languages because transformations can change the internal representations for multiple interdependent classes and because encapsulation can be violated by pointers to mutable objects. In this paper, an existing theory of representation independence for a single class, based on a simple notion of ownership confinement, is generalized to a hierarchy of classes and used to prove refactoring rules that embody transformations of complete class trees. This allows us to formalize refactorings that inherently involve class inheritance, such as Pull Up or Push Down Field; moreover, this makes it possible to generalize refactorings previously restricted to change of data representation of private attributes (like Extract Class and Encapsulate Field) to address data refinement of protected attributes, dealing with the impact that the corresponding transformations may cause in the subclasses. The utility of the proposed rules is shown in a relatively extensive case study. Shortcomings of the theory are described as a challenge to other approaches to heap encapsulation and relational reasoning for classes

Scaling Testing of Refactoring Engines

Defining and implementing refactorings is a nontrivial task since it is difficult to define preconditions to guarantee that the transformation preserves the program behavior. Therefore, refactoring engines may apply incorrect transformations in which the resulting program does not compile, preserve behavior, or follow the refactoring definitions. These engines may also prevent correct transformations due to overly strong preconditions. We find that 84% of the test suites of Eclipse and JRRT are concerned to detect those kinds of bugs. However, the engines still have them. Researchers have proposed a number of techniques for testing refactoring engines. Nevertheless, they may have limitations related to the bug type, program generation, time consumption, and number of refactoring engines necessary to evaluate the implementations. We propose and implement a technique to scale testing of refactoring engines. We improve expressiveness of a program generator and use a technique to skip some test inputs to improve performance. Moreover, we propose new oracles to detect behavioral changes using change impact analysis, overly strong preconditions by disabling preconditions, and transformation issues. We evaluate our technique in 28 refactoring implementations of Java (Eclipse and JRRT) and C (Eclipse) and find 119 bugs. The technique reduces the time in 96% using skips while missing only 6% of the bugs. Additionally, it finds the first failure in general in a few seconds using skips. Finally, we evaluate our proposed technique by using other test inputs, such as the input programs of Eclipse and JRRT refactoring test suites. We find 31 bugs not detected by the developers.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Cleaning up Copy-Paste Clones with Interactive Merging

International audienceCopy-paste-modify is a form of software reuse in which developers explicitly duplicate source code. This duplicated source code, amounting to a code clone, is adapted for a new purpose. Copy-paste-modify is popular among software developers, however, empirical evidence shows that it complicates software maintenance and increases the frequency of bugs. To allow developers to use copy-paste-modify without having to worry about these concerns , we propose an approach that automatically merges similar pieces of code by creating suitable abstractions. Because different kinds of abstractions may be beneficial in different contexts, our approach offers multiple abstraction mechanisms, which were selected based on a study of popular open-source repositories. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we have designed and implemented a prototype merging tool for C++ and evaluated it on a number of code clones exhibiting some variation, i.e near-miss clones, in popular Open Source packages. We observed that maintainers find our algorithmically created abstractions to be largely preferable to the existing duplicated code

A Multi-Level Framework for the Detection, Prioritization and Testing of Software Design Defects

Large-scale software systems exhibit high complexity and become difficult to maintain. In fact, it has been reported that software cost dedicated to maintenance and evolution activities is more than 80% of the total software costs. In particular, object-oriented software systems need to follow some traditional design principles such as data abstraction, encapsulation, and modularity. However, some of these non-functional requirements can be violated by developers for many reasons such as inexperience with object-oriented design principles, deadline stress. This high cost of maintenance activities could potentially be greatly reduced by providing automatic or semi-automatic solutions to increase system‟s comprehensibility, adaptability and extensibility to avoid bad-practices. The detection of refactoring opportunities focuses on the detection of bad smells, also called antipatterns, which have been recognized as the design situations that may cause software failures indirectly. The correction of one bad smell may influence other bad smells. Thus, the order of fixing bad smells is important to reduce the effort and maximize the refactoring benefits. However, very few studies addressed the problem of finding the optimal sequence in which the refactoring opportunities, such as bad smells, should be ordered. Few other studies tried to prioritize refactoring opportunities based on the types of bad smells to determine their severity. However, the correction of severe bad smells may require a high effort which should be optimized and the relationships between the different bad smells are not considered during the prioritization process. The main goal of this research is to help software engineers to refactor large-scale systems with a minimum effort and few interactions including the detection, management and testing of refactoring opportunities. We report the results of an empirical study with an implementation of our bi-level approach. The obtained results provide evidence to support the claim that our proposal is more efficient, on average, than existing techniques based on a benchmark of 9 open source systems and 1 industrial project. We have also evaluated the relevance and usefulness of the proposed bi-level framework for software engineers to improve the quality of their systems and support the detection of transformation errors by generating efficient test cases.Ph.D.Information Systems Engineering, College of Engineering and Computer ScienceUniversity of Michigan-Dearbornhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136075/1/Dilan_Sahin_Final Dissertation.pdfDescription of Dilan_Sahin_Final Dissertation.pdf : Dissertatio

The Design and Implementation of Bloqqi - A Feature-Based Diagram Programming Language

This dissertation presents the design and implementation of a new block diagram programming language, Bloqqi, for building control systems with focus on variability. The language has been developed in collaboration with industry with the goal of reducing engineering time and improving reuse of functionality.When building a control system for a plant, there are typically different variants of the same base functionality. A plant may have several variants of a tank, for example, one variant with heating and another one without. This dissertation presents novel language mechanisms for describing this kind of variability, based on diagram inheritance. For instance, Bloqqi supports specifying what features, like heating, the base functionality can have. These specifications are then used to automatically derive smart-editing support in the form of a feature-based wizard. In this wizard, the user can select what features the base functionality should have, and code is generated corresponding to these features. The new language mechanisms allow feature-based libraries to be created and extended in a modular way.This dissertation presents techniques for implementing rich graphical editors with smart editing support based on semantic analysis. A prototype compiler and graphical editor have been implemented for the language, using the semantic formalism reference attribute grammars (RAGs). RAGs allow tools to share the semantic specifications, which makes it possible to modularly extend the compiler with support for advanced semantic feedback to the user of the graphical editor