RENAS: Prioritizing Co-Renaming Opportunities of Identifiers

• DOI
• arXiv
• Link
• GitHub: RENAS
• Dataset (Zenodo)
• PDF (accepted manuscript, 2.4 MB)

Abstract

Renaming identifiers in source code is a common refactoring task in software development. When renaming an identifier, other identifiers containing words with the same naming intention related to the renaming should be simultaneously renamed, but specifying these identifiers is a challenging task. This paper introduces a technique called RENAS, which identifies and recommends related identifiers that developers should rename simultaneously in Java applications. RENAS prioritizes renaming candidates based on the relationships and similarities among identifiers. Since identifiers that have a relationship and/or that have similar vocabulary in the source code are often renamed together, their priority scores are determined based on these factors. Identifiers with higher priority are recommended to be renamed together. Through an evaluation involving real renaming instances extracted from change histories and validated manually, RENAS demonstrated an improvement in the F1-measure by more than 0.11 compared to existing renaming recommendation approaches.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{doi-icsme2024,
    author = {Naoki Doi and Yuki Osumi and Shinpei Hayashi},
    title = {{RENAS}: Prioritizing Co-Renaming Opportunities of Identifiers},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 40th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution},
    pages = {562--573},
    doi = {10.1109/ICSME58944.2024.00057},
    year = 2024,
}