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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Fixing Your Own Smells: Adding A Mistake-Based Familiarization Step When Teaching Code Refactoring, Ivan Wei Han Tan, Christopher M. Poskitt Mar 2024

Fixing Your Own Smells: Adding A Mistake-Based Familiarization Step When Teaching Code Refactoring, Ivan Wei Han Tan, Christopher M. Poskitt

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Programming problems can be solved in a multitude of functionally correct ways, but the quality of these solutions (e.g. readability, maintainability) can vary immensely. When code quality is poor, symptoms emerge in the form of 'code smells', which are specific negative characteristics (e.g. duplicate code) that can be resolved by applying refactoring patterns. Many undergraduate computing curricula train students on this software engineering practice, often doing so via exercises on unfamiliar instructor-provided code. Our observation, however, is that this makes it harder for novices to internalise refactoring as part of their own development practices. In this paper, we propose a …


On The Generation, Structure, And Semantics Of Grammar Patterns In Source Code Identifiers, Christian D. Newman,, Reem S. Alsuhaibani, Michael J. Decker, Anthony Peruma, Dishant Kaushik, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Emily Hill Dec 2020

On The Generation, Structure, And Semantics Of Grammar Patterns In Source Code Identifiers, Christian D. Newman,, Reem S. Alsuhaibani, Michael J. Decker, Anthony Peruma, Dishant Kaushik, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Emily Hill

Articles

Identifier names are the atoms of program comprehension. Weak identifier names decrease developer productivity and degrade the performance of automated approaches that leverage identifier names in source code analysis; threatening many of the advantages which stand to be gained from advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Therefore, it is vital to support developers in naming and renaming identifiers. In this paper, we extend our prior work, which studies the primary method through which names evolve: rename refactorings. In our prior work, we contextualize rename changes by examining commit messages and other refactorings. In this extension, we further consider data …


Automated Refactoring Of Legacy Java Software To Enumerated Types, Raffi T. Khatchadourian Jan 2016

Automated Refactoring Of Legacy Java Software To Enumerated Types, Raffi T. Khatchadourian

Publications and Research

Modern Java languages introduce several new features that offer significant improvements over older Java technology. In this article we consider the new enum construct, which provides language support for enumerated types. Prior to recent Java languages, programmers needed to employ various patterns (e.g., the weak enum pattern) to compensate for the absence of enumerated types in Java. Unfortunately, these compensation patterns lack several highly-desirable properties of the enum construct, most notably, type safety. We present a novel fully-automated approach for transforming legacy Java code to use the new enumeration construct. This semantics-preserving approach increases type safety, produces code that is …


Pointcut Rejuvenation: Recovering Pointcut Expressions In Evolving Aspect-Oriented Software, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Phil Greenwood, Awais Rashid, Harry Xu May 2012

Pointcut Rejuvenation: Recovering Pointcut Expressions In Evolving Aspect-Oriented Software, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Phil Greenwood, Awais Rashid, Harry Xu

Publications and Research

Pointcut fragility is a well-documented problem in Aspect-Oriented Programming; changes to the base code can lead to join points incorrectly falling in or out of the scope of pointcuts. In this paper, we present an automated approach that limits fragility problems by providing mechanical assistance in pointcut maintenance. The approach is based on harnessing arbitrarily deep structural commonalities between program elements corresponding to join points selected by a pointcut. The extracted patterns are then applied to later versions to offer suggestions of new join points that may require inclusion. To illustrate that the motivation behind our proposal is well founded, …


Pointcut Rejuvenation: Recovering Pointcut Expressions In Evolving Aspect-Oriented Software, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Phil Greenwood, Awais Rashid, Guoqing Harry Xu Nov 2009

Pointcut Rejuvenation: Recovering Pointcut Expressions In Evolving Aspect-Oriented Software, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Phil Greenwood, Awais Rashid, Guoqing Harry Xu

Publications and Research

Pointcut fragility is a well-documented problem in Aspect-Oriented Programming; changes to the base-code can lead to join points incorrectly falling in or out of the scope of pointcuts. We present an automated approach that limits fragility problems by providing mechanical assistance in pointcut maintenance. The approach is based on harnessing arbitrarily deep structural commonalities between program elements corresponding to join points selected by a pointcut. The extracted patterns are then applied to later versions to offer suggestions of new join points that may require inclusion. We demonstrate the usefulness of our technique by rejuvenating pointcuts in multiple versions of several …


Rejuvenate Pointcut: A Tool For Pointcut Expression Recovery In Evolving Aspect-Oriented Software, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Awais Rashid Sep 2008

Rejuvenate Pointcut: A Tool For Pointcut Expression Recovery In Evolving Aspect-Oriented Software, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Awais Rashid

Publications and Research

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) strives to localize the scattered and tangled implementations of crosscutting concerns (CCCs) by allowing developers to declare that certain actions (advice) should be taken at specific points (join points) during the execution of software where a CCC (an aspect) is applicable. However, it is non-trivial to construct optimal pointcut expressions (a collection of join points) that capture the true intentions of the programmer and, upon evolution, maintain these intentions. We demonstrate an AspectJ source-level inferencing tool called rejuvenate pointcut which helps developers maintain pointcut expressions over the lifetime of a software product. A key insight into the …


Automated Refactoring Of Legacy Java Software To Enumerated Types, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Jason Sawin, Atanas Rountev Oct 2007

Automated Refactoring Of Legacy Java Software To Enumerated Types, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Jason Sawin, Atanas Rountev

Publications and Research

Modern Java languages introduce several new features that offer significant improvements over older Java technology. In this article we consider the new enum construct, which provides language support for enumerated types. Prior to recent Java languages, programmers needed to employ various patterns (e.g., the weak enum pattern) to compensate for the absence of enumerated types in Java. Unfortunately, these compensation patterns lack several highly-desirable properties of the enum construct, most notably, type safety. We present a novel fully-automated approach for transforming legacy Java code to use the new enumeration construct. This semantics-preserving approach increases type safety, produces code that is …


Automated Refactoring Of Legacy Java Software To Enumerated Types, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Jason Sawin, Atanas Rountev Apr 2007

Automated Refactoring Of Legacy Java Software To Enumerated Types, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Jason Sawin, Atanas Rountev

Publications and Research

Modern Java languages introduce several new features that offer significant improvements over older Java technology. In this article we consider the new enum construct, which provides language support for enumerated types. Prior to recent Java languages, programmers needed to employ various patterns (e.g., the weak enum pattern) to compensate for the absence of enumerated types in Java. Unfortunately, these compensation patterns lack several highly-desirable properties of the enum construct, most notably, type safety. We present a novel fully-automated approach for transforming legacy Java code to use the new enumeration construct. This semantics-preserving approach increases type safety, produces code that is …