Identifying Extract Method Opportunities Based on Variable References (S)

Long methods are usually difficult to read and comprehend due to the length and complexity of the code. As a result, maintenance can be time consuming and costly. One strategy to lower overall cost of software development for large systems is to produce smaller and less complex methods through method refactoring. This paper presents a new technique to automate the selection process of program fragments for refactoring. The soundness of this technique has been demonstrated through experiments on several different software systems. Long method defects can effectively be resolved by extracting code fragments identified with the support of a tool we have developed. Keywords-Extract Method Refactoring; Long Method defects; Placement Tree