Recommending Variable Names for Extract Local Variable Refactorings

TL;DR

VarNamer is an automated tool that improves variable name recommendations for extract local variable refactorings, significantly outperforming existing IDE suggestions and speeding up the refactoring process.

Contribution

This paper introduces VarNamer, a novel approach combining static analysis and data mining to enhance variable name recommendations, with successful integration into Eclipse and demonstrated effectiveness across languages.

Findings

VarNamer increases exact match rate by 52.6% over Eclipse.

It improves refactoring speed by 27.8%.

It reduces renaming edits by 49.3%.

Abstract

Extract local variable is one of the most popular refactorings, and most IDEs and refactoring tools provide automated support for this refactoring. However, we find approximately 70% of the names recommended by these IDEs are different from what developers manually constructed, adding additional renaming burdens to developers and providing limited assistance. In this paper, we introduce VarNamer, an automated approach designed to recommend variable names for extract local variable refactorings. Through a large-scale empirical study, we identify key contexts that are useful for composing variable names. Leveraging these insights, we developed a set of heuristic rules through program static analysis techniques and employ data mining techniques to recommend variable names effectively. Notably, some of our heuristic rules have been successfully integrated into Eclipse, where they are now distributed with the latest releases of the IDE. Evaluation demonstrates its superiority over state-of-the-art IDEs. Specifically, VarNamer significantly increases the chance of exact match by 52.6% compared to Eclipse and 40.7% compared to IntelliJ IDEA. We also evaluated the proposed approach with real-world extract local variable refactorings conducted in C++ projects, and the results suggest that the approach can achieve comparable performance on programming languages besides Java. It may suggest the generalizability of VarNamer. Finally, we designed and conducted a user study and the results of the user study suggest that our approach can speed up the refactoring by 27.8% and reduce 49.3% edits on the recommended variable names.