Automated Detection of Refactorings in Evolving Components

One of the costs of reusing software components is migrating applications to use the new version of the components. Migrating an application can be error-prone, tedious, and disruptive of the development process. Our previous work shows that more than 80% of the disruptive changes in four different components were caused by refactorings. If the refactorings that happened between two versions of a component could be automatically detected, a refactoring tool could replay them on applications. We present an algorithm that detects refactorings performed during component evolution. Our algorithm uses a combination of a fast syntactic analysis to detect refactoring candidates and a more expensive semantic analysis to refine the results. The experiments on codebases ranging from 17 KLOC to 350 KLOC show that our algorithm detects refactorings in real-world components with accuracy over 85%