RefactorHub: A Commit Annotator for Refactoring

It is necessary to gather real refactoring instances while conducting empirical studies on refactoring. However, existing refactoring detection approaches are insufficient in terms of their accuracy and coverage. Reducing the manual effort of curating refactoring data is challenging in terms of obtaining various refactoring data accurately. This paper proposes a tool named RefactorHub, which supports users to manually annotate potential refactoring-related commits obtained from existing refactoring detection approaches to make their refactoring information more accurate and complete with rich details. In the proposed approach, the parameters of each refactoring operation are defined as a meaningful set of code elements in the versions before or after refactoring. RefactorHub provides interfaces and supporting features to annotate each parameter, such as the automated filling of dependent parameters, thereby avoiding wrong or uncertain selections. A preliminary user study showed that RefactorHub reduced annotation effort and improved the degree of agreement among users. Source code and demo video are available at https://github.com/salab/RefactorHub