Search-based refactoring: Towards semantics preservation

Refactoring restructures a program to improve its structure without altering its behavior. However, it is challenging to preserve the domain semantics of a program when refactoring is decided/implemented automatically. Indeed, a program could be syntactically correct, have the right behavior, but mo...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ouni, A., Kessentini, M., Sahraoui, H., Hamdi, M. S.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Design-defects
Multi-objective Optimization
Optimization
Search-based Software Engineerng
Semantic Similarity
Semantics
Sociology
Software
Software Maintenance
Statistics
Vectors
Vocabulary
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Summary:Refactoring restructures a program to improve its structure without altering its behavior. However, it is challenging to preserve the domain semantics of a program when refactoring is decided/implemented automatically. Indeed, a program could be syntactically correct, have the right behavior, but model incorrectly the domain semantics. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective optimization approach to find the best sequence of refactorings that maximizes quality improvements (program structure) and minimizes semantic errors. To this end, we use the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) to find the best compromise between these two conflicting objectives. We report the results of our experiments on different open source projects.
ISSN:1063-6773
2576-3148
DOI:10.1109/ICSM.2012.6405292