How Much Can a Behavior-Preserving Changeset Be Decomposed into Refactoring Operations?
Fuente:
arXiv
Enregistré dans:
| Auteurs principaux: | , , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Publié: |
2025
|
| Sujets: | |
| Accès en ligne: | |
| Tags: |
Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
|
| _version_ | 1866908491927519232 |
|---|---|
| author | Someya, Kota Chen, Lei Decker, Michael J. Hayashi, Shinpei |
| author_facet | Someya, Kota Chen, Lei Decker, Michael J. Hayashi, Shinpei |
| contents | Developers sometimes mix behavior-preserving modifications, such as refactorings, with behavior-altering modifications, such as feature additions. Several approaches have been proposed to support understanding such modifications by separating them into those two parts. Such refactoring-aware approaches are expected to be particularly effective when the behavior-preserving parts can be decomposed into a sequence of more primitive behavior-preserving operations, such as refactorings, but this has not been explored. In this paper, as an initial validation, we quantify how much of the behavior-preserving modifications can be decomposed into refactoring operations using a dataset of functionally-equivalent method pairs. As a result, when using an existing refactoring detector, only 33.9% of the changes could be identified as refactoring operations. In contrast, when including 67 newly defined functionally-equivalent operations, the coverage increased by over 128%. Further investigation into the remaining unexplained differences was conducted, suggesting improvement opportunities. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_11993 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | How Much Can a Behavior-Preserving Changeset Be Decomposed into Refactoring Operations? Someya, Kota Chen, Lei Decker, Michael J. Hayashi, Shinpei Software Engineering Developers sometimes mix behavior-preserving modifications, such as refactorings, with behavior-altering modifications, such as feature additions. Several approaches have been proposed to support understanding such modifications by separating them into those two parts. Such refactoring-aware approaches are expected to be particularly effective when the behavior-preserving parts can be decomposed into a sequence of more primitive behavior-preserving operations, such as refactorings, but this has not been explored. In this paper, as an initial validation, we quantify how much of the behavior-preserving modifications can be decomposed into refactoring operations using a dataset of functionally-equivalent method pairs. As a result, when using an existing refactoring detector, only 33.9% of the changes could be identified as refactoring operations. In contrast, when including 67 newly defined functionally-equivalent operations, the coverage increased by over 128%. Further investigation into the remaining unexplained differences was conducted, suggesting improvement opportunities. |
| title | How Much Can a Behavior-Preserving Changeset Be Decomposed into Refactoring Operations? |
| topic | Software Engineering |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11993 |