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Supporting single responsibility through automated extract method refactoring

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Abstract

The responsibility of a method/function is to perform some desired computations and disseminate the results to its caller through various deliverables, including object fields and variables in output instructions. Based on this definition of responsibility, this paper offers a new algorithm to refactor long methods to those with a single responsibility. We propose a backward slicing algorithm to decompose a long method into slightly overlapping slices. The slices are computed for each output instruction, representing the outcome of a responsibility delegated to the method. The slices will be non-overlapping if the slicing criteria address the same output variable. The slices are further extracted as independent methods, invoked by the original method, if certain behavioral preservation are made. The proposed method has been evaluated on the GEMS extract method refactoring benchmark and three real-world projects. On average, our experiments demonstrate at least a 29.6% improvement in precision and a 12.1% improvement in the recall of uncovering refactoring opportunities compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, our tool improves method-level cohesion metrics by an average of 20% after refactoring. Experimental results confirm the applicability of the proposed approach in extracting methods with a single responsibility.

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Data Availibility Statement

The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available in the SBSRE GitHub repository, https://github.com/Alireza-Ardalani/SBSRE.

Notes

  1. The slice is defined for a slicing criterion \(C=(x,v)\) where x is a statement (line number) in program P and v is a variable in x. A static slice includes all the statements that can affect the value of variable v at statement x for any possible input.

  2. Expansion in backward slicing refers to tracing backward from a slicing criterion (which includes a statement and a variable within it) to discover all statements that affect the variable’s value.

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Funding

This study has received no funding from any organization.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Resalat, Hengam St., Tehran, 16846-13114, Iran

    Alireza Ardalani, Saeed Parsa & Morteza Zakeri-Nasrabadi

  2. Department of Applied Informatics, University of Macedonia, 156 Egnatia Str., Thessaloniki, 54636, Greece

    Alexander Chatzigeorgiou

Authors
  1. Alireza Ardalani
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  2. Saeed Parsa
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  3. Morteza Zakeri-Nasrabadi
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  4. Alexander Chatzigeorgiou
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Correspondence to Saeed Parsa.

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Communicated by: Andy Zaidman.

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Appendix A: Extended Data

Appendix A: Extended Data

Table 19 shows the confusion matrix elements obtained by expert evaluations of different extract method refactoring tools, including the proposed SBSRE tool, JDeodorant, SEMI, JExtract, and GEMS.

Table 19 The confusion matrix elements of the proposed refactoring opportunities based on the experts’ opinions
Full size table

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Ardalani, A., Parsa, S., Zakeri-Nasrabadi, M. et al. Supporting single responsibility through automated extract method refactoring. Empir Software Eng 29, 28 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10427-3

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