2:00 - 2:30 |
Manual Refactoring Changes with Automated Refactoring Validation
Refactoring, the practice of applying behavior-preserving changes to existing code, can enhance the quality of software systems. Refactoring tools can automatically perform and check the correctness of refactorings. However, even when developers have these tools, they still perform about 90% of refactorings manually, which is error-prone. To address this problem, we propose a technique called GhostFactor separating transformation and correctness checking: we allow the developer to transform code manually, but check the correctness of her transformation automatically. We implemented our technique as a Visual Studio plugin, then evaluated it with a human study of eight software developers; GhostFactor improved the correctness of manual refactorings by 67%
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Xi Ge and Emerson Murphy-Hill |
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North Carolina State University, USA |
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2:30 - 3:00 |
Alternate Refactoring Paths Reveal Usability Problems
Modern Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) support many refactorings. Yet, programmers greatly underuse automated refactorings. Recent studies have applied traditional usability testing methodologies such as surveys, lab studies, and interviews to find the usability problems of refactoring tools. However, these methodologies can only identify certain kinds of usability problems. The critical incident technique (CIT) is a general methodology that uncovers usability problems by analyzing troubling user interactions. We adapt CIT to refactoring tools and show that alternate refactoring paths are indicators of the usability problems of refactoring tools. We define an alternate refactoring path as a sequence of user interactions that contains cancellations, reported messages, or repeated invocations of the refactoring tool. We evaluated our method on a large corpus of refactoring usage data, which we collected during a field study on 36 programmers over three months. This method revealed 15 usability problems, 13 of which were previously unknown. We reported these problems and proposed design improvements to Eclipse developers. The developers acknowledged all of the problems and have already fixed four of them. This result suggests that analyzing alternate paths is effective at discovering the usability problems of interactive program transformation (IPT) tools.
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Mohsen Vakilian and Ralph E. Johnson |
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA |
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3:00 - 3:30 |
A Study and Toolkit for Asynchronous Programming in C#
Asynchronous programming is in demand today, because responsiveness is increasingly important on all modern devices. Yet, we know little about how developers use asynchronous programming in practice. Without such knowledge, developers, researchers, language and library designers, and tool providers can make wrong assumptions. We present the first study that analyzes the usage of asynchronous programming in a large experiment. We analyzed 1378 open source Windows Phone (WP) apps, comprising 12M SLOC, produced by 3376 developers. Using this data, we answer 2 research questions about use and misuse of asynchronous constructs. Inspired by these findings, we developed (i) Asyncifier, an automated refactoring tool that converts callback-based asynchronous code to use async/await; (ii) Corrector, a tool that finds and corrects common misuses of async/await. Our empirical evaluation shows that these tools are (i) applicable and (ii) efficient. Developers accepted 314 patches generated by our tools.
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ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award |
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Semih Okur, David L. Hartveld, Danny Dig, and Arie van Deursen |
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA; Delft University of Technology, Netherlands; Oregon State University, USA |
3:30 - 4:00 |
Reuse-Oriented Reverse Engineering of Functional Components from X86 Binaries
Locating, extracting, and reusing the implementation of a feature within an existing binary program is challenging. This paper proposes a novel algorithm to identify modular functions corresponding to such features and to provide usable interfaces for the extracted functions. We provide a way to represent a desired feature with two executions that both execute the feature but with different inputs. Instead of reverse engineering the interface of a function, we wrap the existing interface and provide a simpler and more intuitive interface for the function through concretization and redirection. Experiments show that our technique can be applied to extract varied features from several real world applications including a malicious application.
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Dohyeong Kim, William N. Sumner, Xiangyu Zhang, Dongyan Xu, and Hira Agrawal |
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Purdue University, USA; Simon Fraser University, Canada; Applied Communications Sciences, USA |