A Code Refactoring Dataset and Its Assessment Regarding Software Maintainability

Abstract

It is very common in various fields that there is a gap between theoretical results and their practical applications. This is true for code refactoring as well, which has a solid theoretical background while being used in development practice at the same time. However, more and more studies suggest that developers perform code refactoring entirely differently than the theory would suggest.Our paper encourages the further investigation of code refactorings in practice by providing an excessive open dataset of source code metrics and applied refactorings through several releases of 7 open-source systems. As a first step of processing this dataset, we examined the quality attributes of the refactored source code classes and the values of source code metrics improved by those refactorings. Our early results show that lower maintainability indeed triggers more code refactorings in practice and these refactorings significantly decrease complexity, code lines, coupling and clone metrics. However, we observed a decrease in comment related metrics in the refactored code.

An Exploratory Study on the Relationship between Changes and Refactoring

“…It is worth noting that we focus our attention on a relative small number of software systems because, as detailed in Section II-A, we relied on a publicly available dataset composed of 12,922 operations (manually validated) related to 28 different refactoring types identified in each of the considered releases [18]. Note that while other datasets are available [21], to the best of our knowledge the one built by Bavota et al is the largest one in terms of refactoring operations (12,922 vs 7,872 reported by Kadar et al).…”

Visualizing software refactoring using radar charts

“…The dataset utilized in this was adopted from a previous study of 34,35 that provided extensive information regarding refactoring and source code metrics for 7 open-source Java systems (Table 1). It is composed of 37 releases of these systems and is characterized by a comprehensive manual validation process that guarantees the accuracy and reliability of the data.…”

“…The dataset used in this research encompasses a range of refactoring types, with 23 classes and 19 methods. The data repository is available from 34,35 at http:// www. inf.u-szeged.…”

A literature review for measuring maintainability of code clone

“…Kadar et al [54] put forward the idea to examine code refactoring as a means of creating an open dataset that would be necessary for utilizing software code metrics and refactoring techniques across various versions of seven systems. Through the use of refactoring methods, the authors aimed to analyze the quality features of duplicate source code classes, as well as the effectiveness of updating source code metrics.…”