An Initial Investigation into Change-Based Reconstruction of Floss-Refactorings

Today, it is widely accepted that if refactoring is applied in practice, it is mainly interweaved with normal software development - so called "floss refactoring". Unfortunately, the current state-of-the-art is poorly equipped to mine floss refactoring from version histories, mainly because they infer refactorings by comparing two snapshots of a system and making educated guesses about the precise edit operations applied in between. In this paper we propose a solution that reconstructs refactorings not on snapshots of a system but using the actual changes as they are performed in an integrated development environment. We compare our solution against RefFinder and demonstrate that on a small yet representative program (the well-known "Video Rental system") our approach is more accurate in identifying occurrences of the "Move Method" and "Rename Method" refactorings.