Behind the Intent of Extract Method Refactoring: A Systematic Literature Review
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering(2023)
摘要
Code refactoring is widely recognized as an essential software engineering
practice to improve the understandability and maintainability of the source
code. The Extract Method refactoring is considered as "Swiss army knife" of
refactorings, as developers often apply it to improve their code quality. In
recent years, several studies attempted to recommend Extract Method
refactorings allowing the collection, analysis, and revelation of actionable
data-driven insights about refactoring practices within software projects. In
this paper, we aim at reviewing the current body of knowledge on existing
Extract Method refactoring research and explore their limitations and potential
improvement opportunities for future research efforts. Hence, researchers and
practitioners begin to be aware of the state-of-the-art and identify new
research opportunities in this context. We review the body of knowledge related
to Extract Method refactoring in the form of a systematic literature review
(SLR). After compiling an initial pool of 1,367 papers, we conducted a
systematic selection and our final pool included 83 primary studies. We define
three sets of research questions and systematically develop and refine a
classification schema based on several criteria including their methodology,
applicability, and degree of automation. The results construct a catalog of 83
Extract Method approaches indicating that several techniques have been proposed
in the literature. Our results show that: (i) 38.6% of Extract Method
refactoring studies primarily focus on addressing code clones; (ii) Several of
the Extract Method tools incorporate the developer's involvement in the
decision-making process when applying the method extraction, and (iii) the
existing benchmarks are heterogeneous and do not contain the same type of
information, making standardizing them for the purpose of benchmarking
difficult.
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关键词
extract method,refactoring,quality,systematic literature review
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