Automatic identification of Java method naming patterns using cascade K-medoids

This paper suggests an automatic approach to extracting Java method implementation patterns associated with method identifiers using Cascade K-Medoids. Java method implementation patterns indicate recurring implementations for achieving the purpose described in the method identifier with the given parameters and return type. If the implementation is different from the purpose, readers of the code tend to take more time to comprehend the method, which eventually affects to the increment of software maintenance cost. In order to automatically identify implementation patterns and its representative sample code, we first propose three groups of feature vectors for characterizing the Java method signature, method body and their relation. Then, we apply Cascade K-Medoids by enhancing the K-Medoids algorithm with the Calinski and Harrabasez algorithm. As the evaluation of our approach, we identified 16,768 implementation patterns of 7,169 method identifiers from 50 open source projects. The implementation patterns have been validated by the 30 industrial practitioners with from 1 to 6 years industrial experience, resulting in 86% of the precision.