Data-Driven Extract Method Recommendations: A Study at ING

Conference Paper (2021)
Author(s)

David van der Leij (Student TU Delft, ING Bank)

J.R. Binda (ING Bank)

Robbert van Dalen (ING Bank)

Pieter Vallen (ING Bank)

Yaping Luo (ING Bank, Eindhoven University of Technology)

Maurício Aniche (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Research Group
Software Engineering
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1145/3468264.3473927 Final published version
More Info
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Publication Year
2021
Language
English
Research Group
Software Engineering
Pages (from-to)
1337-1347
ISBN (electronic)
978-1-4503-8562-6
Event
ESEC/FSE 2021: 29th ACM Joint European<br/>Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software<br/>Engineering (2021-08-23 - 2021-08-28), athens, Greece
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Abstract

The sound identification of refactoring opportunities is still an open problem in software engineering. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness of machine learning models in recommending methods that should undergo different refactoring operations. In this work, we experiment with such approaches to identify methods that should undergo an Extract Method refactoring, in the context of ING, a large financial organization. More specifically, we (i) compare the code metrics distributions, which are used as features by the models, between open-source and ING systems, (ii) measure the accuracy of different machine learning models in recommending Extract Method refactorings, (iii) compare the recommendations given by the models with the opinions of ING experts. Our results show that the feature distributions of ING systems and open-source systems are somewhat different, that machine learning models can recommend Extract Method refactorings with high accuracy, and that experts tend to agree with most of the recommendations of the model.