Automated Code Refactoring upon Database-Schema Changes in Web Applications

Modern web applications manipulate a large amount of user data and undergo frequent data-schema changes. These changes bring up a unique refactoring task: updating application code to be consistent with data schema. Previous study and our own investigation show that this type of refactoring is error-prone and time-consuming for developers. This paper presents EvolutionSaver, a static code analysis and transformation tool that automates schema-related code refactoring and consistency checking. EvolutionSaver is implemented as an IDE plugin that works for both Rails and Django applications. The source code of EvolutionSaver is available on Github [1] and the plugin can be downloaded from Visual Studio Marketplace [2], with its tutorial available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBiMkLFIjbE and DOI 10.5281/zenodo.5276127.