Davood Mazinanian

Discovering refactoring opportunities in cascading style sheets

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a language used for describing the look and formatting of HTML documents. CSS has been widely adopted in web and mobile development practice, since it enables a clean separation of content from presentation. The language exhibits complex features, such as inheritance, cascading and specificity, which make CSS code hard to maintain. Therefore, it is important to find ways to improve the maintainability of CSS code. In this paper, we propose an automated approach to remove duplication in CSS code. More specifically, we have developed a technique that detects three types of CSS declaration duplication and recommends refactoring opportunities to eliminate those duplications. Our approach uses preconditions that ensure the application of a refactoring will preserve the original document styling. We evaluate our technique on 38 real-world web systems and 91 CSS files, in total. Our findings show that duplication in CSS code is widely prevalent. Additionally, there is a significant number of presentation-preserving refactoring opportunities that can reduce the size of the CSS files and increase the maintainability of the code.

Assessing the Refactorability of Software Clones

The presence of duplicated code in software systems is significant and several studies have shown that clones can be potentially harmful with respect to the maintainability and evolution of the source code. Despite the significance of the problem, there is still limited support for eliminating software clones through refactoring, because the unification and merging of duplicated code is a very challenging problem, especially when software clones have gone through several modifications after their initial introduction. In this work, we propose an approach for automatically assessing whether a pair of clones can be safely refactored without changing the behavior of the program. In particular, our approach examines if the differences present between the clones can be safely parameterized without causing any side-effects. The evaluation results have shown that the clones assessed as refactorable by our approach can be indeed refactored without causing any compile errors or test failures. Additionally, the computational cost of the proposed approach is negligible (less than a second) in the vast majority of the examined cases. Finally, we perform a large-scale empirical study on over a million clone pairs detected by four different clone detection tools in nine open-source projects to investigate how refactorability is affected by different clone properties and tool configuration options. Among the highlights of our conclusions, we found that (a) clones in production code tend to be more refactorable than clones in test code, (b) clones with a close relative location (i.e., same method, type, or file) tend to be more refactorable than clones in distant locations (i.e., same hierarchy, or unrelated types), (c) Type-1 clones tend to be more refactorable than the other clone types, and (d) clones with a small size tend to be more refactorable than clones with a larger size.

JDeodorant: clone refactoring

Code duplication is widely recognized as a potentially harmful code smell for the maintenance of software systems. In this demonstration, we present a tool, developed as part of the JDeodorant Eclipse plug-in, which offers cutting-edge features for the analysis and refactoring of clones found in Java projects. https://youtu.be/K xAEqIEJ-4

An Empirical Study on the Use of CSS Preprocessors

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the standard language for styling structured documents, such as HTML. However, CSS lacks most of the traditional programming constructs, including variables and functions, which enable code reuse and structured programming. Alternatively, CSS Preprocessors (e.g., LESS, SASS) have been introduced as superset languages to extend CSS by supporting those missing constructs. While these languages are being widely used by developers, we do not have sufficient knowledge about how developers take advantage of the features they provide. Gaining this knowledge is crucial for providing better tool support to the developer community by devising techniques for the automatic migration of existing CSS code to take advantage of CSS Preprocessor language features, designing refactoring recommendation systems for existing Preprocessor code, and giving insights to the Preprocessor language designers for improving language usability. In this paper, we have empirically investigated the CSS Preprocessor codebase of 150 websites regarding four preprocessor features, namely variables, nested selectors, mixins and extend constructs, and report the discovered usage patterns for each feature. We also discuss how the gained knowledge can be put into practice towards improving the development and maintenance of CSS preprocessor code.

Migrating cascading style sheets to preprocessors by introducing mixins

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the standard language for styling web documents and is extensively used in the industry. However, CSS lacks constructs that would allow code reuse (e.g., functions). Consequently, maintaining CSS code is often a cumbersome and error-prone task. Preprocessors (e.g., Less and Sass) have been introduced to fill this gap, by extending CSS with the missing constructs. Despite the clear maintainability benefits coming from the use of preprocessors, there is currently no support for migrating legacy CSS code to preprocessors. In this paper, we propose a technique for automatically detecting duplicated style declarations in CSS code that can be migrated to preprocessor functions (i.e., mixins). Our technique can parameterize differences in the style values of duplicated declarations, and ensure that the migration will not change the presentation semantics of the web documents. The evaluation has shown that our technique is able to detect 98% of the mix-ins that professional developers introduced in websites and Style Sheet libraries, and can safely migrate real CSS code.

Clone refactoring with lambda expressions

Lambda expressions have been introduced in Java 8 to support functional programming and enable behavior parameterization by passing functions as parameters to methods. The majority of software clones (duplicated code) are known to have behavioral differences (i.e., Type-2 and Type-3 clones). However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no previous work to investigate the utility of Lambda expressions for parameterizing such behavioral differences in clones. In this paper, we propose a technique that examines the applicability of Lambda expressions for the refactoring of clones with behavioral differences. Moreover, we empirically investigate the applicability and characteristics of the Lambda expressions introduced to refactor a large dataset of clones. Our findings show that Lambda expressions enable the refactoring of a significant portion of clones that could not be refactored by any other means.

Detecting Function Constructors in JavaScript

Prior to the recent updates of the JavaScript language specifications, developers had to use custom solutions to emulate constructs such as classes, modules, and namespaces in JavaScript programs. This paper introduces JSDEODORANT, an automatic approach for detecting function constructors declared locally, under a namespace, or even in other modules. The comparison with the state-of-the-art tool, JSClassFinder, shows that while the precision of the tools is very similar (97% and 98%), the recall of JSDEODORANT (98%) is much higher than JSClassFinder (61%).

Accurate and efficient refactoring detection in commit history

Refactoring detection algorithms have been crucial to a variety of applications: (i) empirical studies about the evolution of code, tests, and faults, (ii) tools for library API migration, (iii) improving the comprehension of changes and code reviews, etc. However, recent research has questioned the accuracy of the state-of-the-art refactoring detection tools, which poses threats to the reliability of their application. Moreover, previous refactoring detection tools are very sensitive to user-provided similarity thresholds, which further reduces their practical accuracy. In addition, their requirement to build the project versions/revisions under analysis makes them inapplicable in many real-world scenarios. To reinvigorate a previously fruitful line of research that has stifled, we designed, implemented, and evaluated RMiner, a technique that overcomes the above limitations. At the heart of RMiner is an AST-based statement matching algorithm that determines refactoring candidates without requiring user-defined thresholds. To empirically evaluate RMiner, we created the most comprehensive oracle to date that uses triangulation to create a dataset with considerably reduced bias, representing 3,188 refactorings from 185 open-source projects. Using this oracle, we found that RMiner has a precision of 98% and recall of 87%, which is a significant improvement over the previous state-of-the-art.

Understanding the use of lambda expressions in Java

Java 8 retrofitted lambda expressions, a core feature of functional programming, into a mainstream object-oriented language with an imperative paradigm. However, we do not know how Java developers have adapted to the functional style of thinking, and more importantly, what are the reasons motivating Java developers to adopt functional programming. Without such knowledge, researchers miss opportunities to improve the state of the art, tool builders use unrealistic assumptions, language designers fail to improve upon their designs, and developers are unable to explore efficient and effective use of lambdas. We present the first large-scale, quantitative and qualitative empirical study to shed light on how imperative programmers use lambda expressions as a gateway into functional thinking. Particularly, we statically scrutinize the source code of 241 open-source projects with 19,770 contributors, to study the characteristics of 100,540 lambda expressions. Moreover, we investigate the historical trends and adoption rates of lambdas in the studied projects. To get a complementary perspective, we seek the underlying reasons on why developers introduce lambda expressions, by surveying 97 developers who are introducing lambdas in their projects, using the firehouse interview method. Among others, our findings revealed an increasing trend in the adoption of lambdas in Java: in 2016, the ratio of lambdas introduced per added line of code increased by 54% compared to 2015. Lambdas were used for various reasons, including but not limited to (i) making existing code more succinct and readable, (ii) avoiding code duplication, and (iii) simulating lazy evaluation of functions. Interestingly, we found out that developers are using Javas built-in functional interfaces inefficiently, i.e., they prefer to use general functional interfaces over the specialized ones, overlooking the performance overheads that might be imposed. Furthermore, developers are not adopting techniques from functional programming, e.g., currying. Finally, we present the implications of our findings for researchers, tool builders, language designers, and developers.

CSSDev: refactoring duplication in cascading style sheets

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a widely-used language for defining the presentation of structured documents and user interfaces. Despite its popularity, CSS still lacks adequate tool support for everyday maintenance tasks, such as debugging and refactoring. In this paper, we present CSSDEV, a tool suite for analyzing CSS code to detect refactoring opportunities.(https://youtu.be/lu3oITi1XrQ).