AntiCopyPaster: Extracting Code Duplicates As Soon As They Are Introduced in the IDE
Eman Abdullah AlOmar, Anton Ivanov, Zarina Kurbatova, Yaroslav Golubev, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Ali Ouni, Timofey Bryksin, Le Minh Long Nguyen, Amit Kini, Aditya Thakur · 2022
We developed a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA called AntiCopyPaster, which tracks the pasting of code fragments inside the IDE and suggests the appropriate Extract Method refactoring to combat the propagation of duplicates. Unlike the existing approaches, our tool is integrated with the developer’s workflow, and pro-actively recommends refactorings. Since not all code fragments need to be extracted, we develop a classification model to make this decision. When a developer copies and pastes a code fragment, the plugin searches for duplicates in the currently opened file, waits for a short period of time to allow the developer to edit the code, and finally inferences the refactoring decision based on a number of features.