RAT: A Refactoring-Aware Tool for Tracking Code History
Feifei Niu, Junqian Shao, Chaofan Xu, Christoph Mayr‐Dorn, Wesley K. G. Assunção, LiGuo Huang, Chuanyi Li, Jidong Ge, Bin Luo, Alexander F. Egyed · 2024
History of code elements is essential for software maintenance tasks. However, code refactoring is one of the main causes that makes obtaining a consistent view on code evolution difficult as renaming or moving source code elements break such history. To this end, this paper presents RAT, a refactoring-aware tool for keeping track of code elements evolution across time, not just in terms of revisions but also in terms of refactoring. This is the first tool that enables fine-grained code element traceability of the whole repository.