An Automated Approach to Extracting Local Variables

Abstract

Extract local variable is a well-known and widely used refactoring. It is frequently employed to replace one or more occurrences of a complex expression with simple accesses to a newly added variable. Although most IDEs provide tool support for extract local variables, such tools without deep analysis of the refactorings may result in semantic errors. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel and more reliable approach, called ValExtractor, to conduct extract variable refactorings automatically. The major challenge of automated extract local variable refactorings is how to efficiently and accurately identify the side effect of the extracted expressions and the potential interaction between the extracted expressions and their contexts without time-consuming dynamic execution of the involved programs. To resolve this challenge, ValExtractor leverages a lightweight static source code analysis to validate the side effect of the selected expression, and to identify which occurrences of the selected expression could be extracted together without changing the semantics of the program or introducing potential new exceptions. Our evaluation results on open-source Java applications suggest that Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA, the state-of-the-practice refactoring engines, resulted in a large number of faulty extract variable refactorings whereas ValExtractor successfully avoided all such errors. The proposed approach has been merged into (and distributed with) Eclipse to improve the safety of extract local variable refactoring.