Inferring Refactoring Intention from Test Case Modification

Existing tools/methods are used to infer refactoring according to production code change in traditional development mode. In the test-driven development (TDD), there are few tools can be used to guide test driven refactoring. In this paper, an approach was proposed to inferring refactoring intension from test case modifications. Firstly, the test code modification was captured with a monitor, and then the potential refactoring was inferred from the captured modification according to predefined heuristics. The proposed approach has been implemented and evaluated with two real applications. Evaluation results show that compared with existing approach the precision increases by 15% and the recall increases by 33.3%~42.8%.