Improving Method Extraction: A Novel Approach to Data Flow Analysis Using Boolean Flags and Expressions.
Nicolas Juillerat, Béat Hirsbrunner · 2007
Method extraction is a complex refactoring: it has to transform statements of source code and preserve semantics. While many recent development environments provide a semi-automated implementation of this refactoring, most of them are still flawed. The part of the process we want to discuss is the so called data flow analysis. Its purpose is to determine the arguments and the results of the method to extract. Various approaches to this problem have been proposed: graph based, scripting languages, and direct analyses. Graph-based approaches [1] are the most widely spread techniques. The problem with graph-based approaches is that the construction of the graph itself from the source code is difficult: the common representation of statements is not a graph, but the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). While these approaches have shown to be good for analyses, their use in