Error detection by refactoring reconstruction

In many cases it is not sufficient to perform a refactoring only at one location of a software project. For example, refactorings may have to be performed consistently to several classes in the inheritance hierarchy, e.g. subclasses or implementing classes, to preserve equal behavior.In this paper we show how to detect incomplete refactorings - which can cause long standing bugs because some of them do not cause compiler errors - by analyzing software archives. To this end we reconstruct the class inheritance hierarchies, as well as refactorings on the level of methods. Then, we relate these refactorings to the corresponding hierarchy in order to find missing refactorings and thus, errors and inconsistencies that have been introduced in a software project at some point of the history.Finally. we demonstrate our approach by case studies on two open source projects.

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