RefExpo: Unveiling Software Project Structures through Advanced Dependency Graph Extraction

TL;DR

RefExpo is a new, reusable dependency graph extraction tool supporting multiple programming languages, providing accurate analysis and outperforming existing tools, thus aiding software project understanding.

Contribution

Introduces RefExpo, a versatile plugin-based dependency graph extraction tool for Java, Python, and JavaScript, with validated high accuracy and improved performance over existing tools.

Findings

RefExpo achieves 92% and 100% recall on micro test suites for Python and Java.

RefExpo outperforms existing tools by 31% and 7% in macro-level experiments.

RefExpo is available on the IntelliJ marketplace with supporting resources.

Abstract

The dependency graph (DG) of a software project offers valuable insights for identifying its key components and has been leveraged in numerous studies. However, there is a lack of reusable tools for DG extraction. Existing tools are either outdated and difficult to configure or fail to provide accurate analysis. This study introduces RefExpo, a reusable DG extraction tool that supports multiple languages such as Java, Python, and JavaScript. RefExpo is a plugin based on IntelliJ, a well-maintained and reputed IDE. We also compile an initial version of our dataset, consisting of 20 Java and Python projects. RefExpo's validity is evaluated at two levels: specific language features and comparisons against other tools, referred to as micro and macro levels. Our results show RefExpo achieves 92\% and 100\% recall on micro test suites Judge and PyCG for Python and Java, respectively. In macro-level experiments, RefExpo outperformed existing tools by 31\% and 7\% in finding unique and shared results. The installable version of RefExpo is available on the IntelliJ marketplace, and a short video describing its functionality is available on YouTube.