Context-Aware Name Recommendation for Field Renaming

Chunhao Dong*, Yanjie Jiang*, Nan Niu, Yuxia Zhang, Hui Liu*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Renaming is one of the most popular software refactorings. Although developers may know what the new name should be when they conduct a renaming, it remains valuable for refactoring tools to recommend new names automatically so that developers can simply hit Enter and efficiently accept the recommendation to accomplish the refactoring. Consequently, most IDEs automatically recommend new names for renaming refactorings by default. However, the recommendation made by mainstream IDEs is often incorrect. For example, the precision of IntelliJ IDEA in recommending names for field renamings is as low as 6.3%. To improve the accuracy, in this paper, we propose a context-aware lightweight approach (called CARER) to recommend new names for Java field renamings. Different from mainstream IDEs that rely heavily on initializers and data types of the to-be-renamed fields, CARER exploits both dynamic and static contexts of the renamings as well as naming conventions. We evaluate CARER on 1.1K real-world field renamings discovered from open-source applications. Our evaluation results suggest that CARER can significantly improve the state of the practice in recommending new names for field renamings, improving the precision from 6.30% to 61.15%, and recall from 6.30% to 41.50%. Our evaluation results also suggest that CARER is as efficient as IntelliJ IDEA is, making it suitable to be integrated into IDEs.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2024 ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2024
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages2905-2917
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9798400702174
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Event44th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2024 - Lisbon, Portugal
Duration: 14 Apr 202420 Apr 2024

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
ISSN (Print)0270-5257

Conference

Conference44th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2024
Country/TerritoryPortugal
CityLisbon
Period14/04/2420/04/24

Keywords

  • Context-Aware
  • Recommendation
  • Refactoring
  • Rename

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Cite this

Dong, C., Jiang, Y., Niu, N., Zhang, Y., & Liu, H. (2024). Context-Aware Name Recommendation for Field Renaming. In Proceedings - 2024 ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2024 (pp. 2905-2917). (Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering). IEEE Computer Society. https://doi.org/10.1145/3597503.3639195