Synthesis of equivalent method calls in Guava

Abstract

We developed a search-based technique to automatically synthesize sequences of method calls that are functionally equivalent to a given target method. This paper presents challenges and results of applying our technique to Google Guava. Guava heavily uses Java generics, and the large number of classes, methods and parameter values required us to tune our technique to deal with a search space that is much larger than what we originally envisioned. We modified our technique to cope with such challenges. The evaluation of the improved version of our technique shows that we can synthesize 188 equivalent method calls for relevant components of Guava, outperforming by 86% the original version.