REMS: Recommending Extract Method Refactoring Opportunities via Multi-view Representation of Code Property Graph

Abstract

Extract Method is one of the most frequently performed refactoring operations for the decomposition of large and complex methods, which can also be combined with other refactoring operations to remove a variety of design flaws. Several Extract Method refactoring tools have been proposed based on the quantification of extraction criteria. To the best of our knowledge, state-of-the-art related techniques can be broadly divided into two categories: the first line is non-machine-learning-based approaches built on heuristics, and the second line is machine learning-based approaches built on historical data. Most of these approaches characterize the extraction criteria by deriving software metrics from fine-grained code properties. However, in most cases, these metrics can be challenging to concretize, and their selections and thresholds also largely rely on expert knowledge. Thus, in this paper, we propose an approach to automatically recommend Extract Method refactoring opportunities named REMS via mining multi-view representations from code property graph. We fuse various representations together using compact bilinear pooling and further train machine learning classifiers to guide the extraction of suitable lines of code as new method. We evaluate our approach on two publicly available datasets. The results show that our approach outperforms five state-of-the-art refactoring tools including GEMS, JExtract, SEMI, JDeodorant, and Segmentation in effectiveness and usefulness. Our approach demonstrates an increase of 29% in precision, 15% in recall, and 23% in f1-measure. The results also unveil practical suggestions and provide new insights that benefit additional extract-related refactoring techniques.