Identifying Extract Method Refactorings

Abstract

Extract method refactoring identifies and extracts a set of statements implementing a specific functionality within a method. Its application enhances the structure of code and provides improved readability and reusability. This paper introduces Segmentation, a new approach for identifying extract method opportunities focusing on achieving higher performance with fewer suggestions. Evaluation of the approach includes six case studies from the open-source domain, and performance is compared against two state-of-the-art approaches. The findings suggest that Segmentation provides improved precision and F measure over both the approaches. Further, improved performance is reflected over long methods too.