Abstract: Automated detection of refactorings is a hot topic in the field of software refactoring.The main purpose of the detection is to facilitate the understanding of software evolution and refactoring on clients according to changes made on their servers.Although a number of methods and tools have been proposed to automatically detect refactorings,to the best of our knowledge there is no methods or tools to detect and extract method refactorings automatically by comparing two versions of an application.To this end,we proposed an approach to detect and extract method refactorings by comparing two successive versions of a given application.We also implemented the proposed approach and validated it with open source applications.Evaluation results on 8 open-source applications suggest that the precision of the proposed approach varies from 65% to 90%.We also conducted an evaluation by monitoring developers on a small application.And evaluation results suggest that the recall and precision of the proposed approach is 85% and 85%,respectively.

Key words: Software refactoring,Refactoring history,Automated detection,Version,Software evolution