Last updated on Monday, October 06, 2025
@inproceedings{Soetens2015IWPSE,
author = {Quinten David Soetens and Javier P{\'e}rez and
Serge Demeyer and Andy Zaidman},
booktitle = {Proceedings IWPSE2015 (the 14th International
Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution)},
note = {Acceptance ratio: 13/31 = 42\%},
pages = {9 -- 18},
publisher = {ACM},
title = {Circumventing refactoring masking using fine-grained
change recording},
year = {2015},
abstract = {Today, refactoring reconstruction techniques are
snapshot-based: they compare two revisions from a
source code management system and calculate the
shortest path of edit operations to go from the one
to the other. An inherent risk with snapshot-based
approaches is that a refactoring may be concealed by
later edit operations acting on the same source code
entity, a phenomenon we call refactoring masking. In
this paper, we performed an experiment to find out at
which point refactoring masking occurs and confirmed
that a snapshot-based technique misses refactorings
when several edit operations are performed on the
same source code entity. We present a way of
reconstructing refactorings using fine grained
changes that are recorded live from an integrated
development environment and demonstrate on two cases
---PMD and Cruisecontrol--- that our approach is more
accurate in a significant number of situations than
the state-of-the-art snapshot-based technique
RefFinder.},
annote = {internationalconference},
doi = {10.1145/2804360.2804362},
isbn = {978-1-4503-3816-5},
}