A Case Study of Refactoring Large-Scale Industrial Systems to Efficiently Improve Source Code Quality

Szőke, Gábor; Nagy, Csaba; Ferenć, Rudolf; Gyimóthy, Tibor

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-09156-3_37

Cited by 14 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 17 publications

(23 reference statements)

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“…However, further research work show that the idea can also be applied to other purposes [3], such as improving performance, security, and reliability. In fact, as our previous research [4] indicates, developers often tend to do refactorings to fix coding issues that clearly affect the quality of the system, instead of refactoring code smells or antipatterns.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bulk Fixing Coding Issues and Its Effects on Software Quality: Is It Worth Refactoring?

Szőke

Antal

Nagy

et al. 2014

2014 IEEE 14th International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation

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The quality of a software system is mostly defined by its source code. Software evolves continuously, it gets modified, enhanced, and new requirements always arise. If we do not spend time periodically on improving our source code, it becomes messy and its quality will decrease inevitably. Literature tells us that we can improve the quality of our software product by regularly refactoring it. But does refactoring really increase software quality? Can it happen that a refactoring decreases the quality? Is it possible to recognize the change in quality caused by a single refactoring operation? In our paper, we seek answers to these questions in a case study of refactoring large-scale proprietary software systems. We analyzed the source code of 5 systems, and measured the quality of several revisions for a period of time. We analyzed 2 million lines of code and identified nearly 200 refactoring commits which fixed over 500 coding issues. We found that one single refactoring only makes a small change (sometimes even decreases quality), but when we do them in blocks, we can significantly increase quality, which can result not only in the local, but also in the global improvement of the code.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bulk Fixing Coding Issues and Its Effects on Software Quality: Is It Worth Refactoring?

Szőke

Antal

Nagy

et al. 2014

2014 IEEE 14th International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation

Self Cite

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“…Another interesting and recent study on refactoring has been proposed by Szoke et al [16], where they provide answers to different questions on refactoring best practices of large scale industrial systems. A very interesting and complete survey on software refactoring in general has been proposed by Mens et al [12], and relevant considerations on how refactoring is done have been made by Murphy-Hill [13].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

On experimenting refactoring tools to remove code smells

Fontana

Mangiacavalli

Pochiero

et al. 2015

Scientific Workshop Proceedings of the XP2015

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When we develop a software project of a certain complexity, source code maintainability could become a problem, in particular if developers do not use a consolidate development process that simplifies the management of the entire project. When source code becomes very complex, it is difficult for developers to share and modify it. We can improve internal software qualities such as reusability, maintainability and readability through refactoring. Refactoring can be applied to remove possible problems in the code, as code smells. Identifying code smells and removing them through refactoring results in better code maintainability, but it can be an overwhelming task. In this paper, we describe our experimentation on using four refactoring tools to remove code smells in four systems, with the aim to outline advantages and disadvantages of the tools with respect to the accomplishment of this task, and to identify the smells easier to be removed among the ones we considered in this paper.

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“…Any of them might be a good solution. However, we will choose coding issues as the main target of our automated refactorings because our preliminary study [27] suggested that this is what developers want the most. To identify coding issues we choose the well known PMD static source code analyzer.…”

Section: Finding Refactoring Suggestionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automating the Refactoring Process

Szőke¹

2017

Acta Cybern

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To decrease software maintenance cost, software development companies use static source code analysis techniques. Static analysis tools are capable of finding potential bugs, anti-patterns, coding rule violations, and they can also enforce coding style standards. Although there are several available static analyzers to choose from, they only support issue detection. The elimination of the issues is still performed manually by developers. Here, we propose a process that supports the automatic elimination of coding issues in Java. We introduce a tool that uses a third-party static analyzer as input and enables developers to automatically fix the detected issues for them. Our tool uses a special technique, called reverse AST-search, to locate source code elements in a syntax tree, just based on location information. Our tool was evaluated and tested in a two-year project with six software development companies where thousands of code smells were identified and fixed in five systems that have altogether over five million lines of code.

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A Case Study of Refactoring Large-Scale Industrial Systems to Efficiently Improve Source Code Quality

Cited by 14 publications

References 17 publications

Bulk Fixing Coding Issues and Its Effects on Software Quality: Is It Worth Refactoring?

Bulk Fixing Coding Issues and Its Effects on Software Quality: Is It Worth Refactoring?

On experimenting refactoring tools to remove code smells

Automating the Refactoring Process

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