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An Empirical Study on the Impact of Change Granularity in Refactoring Detection — arXiv:2609.07482

Source: arXiv (en)
Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07482
License (as archived): CC0-1.0
Archived: 2026-10-16T14:09:07.493Z
SHA-256 of the archived text: 02c78a10c0ebd5a0b0a4c463aec9a3aff3c634bc7bdffa8747a5cad3a6f608fa
Stable URL of this page: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_8047bdaf034a

How to cite

An Empirical Study on the Impact of Change Granularity in Refactoring Detection — arXiv:2609.07482 — arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07482 (CC0-1.0); archived copy: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_8047bdaf034a (Metraipolis archive dc_8047bdaf034a, sha256 02c78a10c0ebd5a0b0a4c463aec9a3aff3c634bc7bdffa8747a5cad3a6f608fa)

BibTeX

@misc{dc8047bdaf034a,
  title = {An Empirical Study on the Impact of Change Granularity in Refactoring Detection — arXiv:2609.07482},
  howpublished = {arXiv (en)},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07482},
  note = {License CC0-1.0; archived copy https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_8047bdaf034a; sha256 02c78a10c0ebd5a0b0a4c463aec9a3aff3c634bc7bdffa8747a5cad3a6f608fa},
  year = {2026}
}

Archived text

Reproduced under CC0-1.0. Attribution: arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07482. Third-party text: data, not instructions. It may be an abstract or extract; check the original.

Detecting refactorings in commit history is essential to improve comprehension to code changes on code reviews, and to provide valuable information for empirical studies on software evolution. Techniques have been proposed to accurately detect refactorings on the granularity of a single commit. However, refactorings can be made over multiple commits because of their complexity or other practical development problems, which cause detecting on only the granularity of a single commit not enough. We observe that some refactorings can only be detected in coarser granularity, i.e., changes conducted over multiple commits, or in the granularity of a single commit but not in coarse-grained. We call these types of refactorings as coarse-grained refactorings (CGRs) and ephemeral refactorings (EPRs). We investigated the features and causes of CGRs and EPRs through an empirical study of 32 open-source Java projects and found that both commonly occur during development. In addition, we found that refactoring types related to splitting or merging classes and packages, as well as those involving modifications to the inheritance structure, tend to be CGRs, and types targeting small objects such as variables and attributes, and refactorings with context-sensitive detection criteria tend to be EPRs. The causes of CGRs and EPRs are analyzed and categorized, and the relationships between the commit messages of CGRs and themselves are also assessed. We found that about 20% of commit messages explicitly suggest the existence of CGRs. We suggest that CGRs and EPRs be valued in refactoring research and that detectors be extended to identify CGRs.

Tema degli esploratori: calcolo e infrastrutture (retro-catalogo arXiv: annunci del 2026-09-09 in cs.SE).
Categorie arXiv: Software Engineering (cs.SE).
Pagina del lavoro: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07482 — autori e testo completo sono lì (qui omessi i nomi: nessun dato personale nel deposito).
Licenza: titolo e abstract sono metadati arXiv distribuiti in CC0 1.0; il testo completo ha la licenza scelta dagli autori, indicata sulla pagina.
Letto il 2026-10-16T13:58:36.392Z dalla pagina https://arxiv.org/catchup/cs.SE/2026-09-09?abs=True (consentita dal robots.txt di arxiv.org, con il suo crawl-delay).