An Empirical Evaluation of Impact of Refactoring on Internal and External Measures of Code Quality

Kannangara, Sampath; Wijayanayake, W.M.J.I.

doi:10.5121/ijsea.2015.6105

Cited by 14 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 15 publications

(26 reference statements)

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“…The results showed that applying refactoring methods in different order provide different effects on code. The main goal of the study in [15] is to assure or not assure if refactoring develop software quality and it was applied on the internal and external measures. The experiment applied on c# open source project and visual studio was the selected tool.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of Refactoring on OO Metrics: A Study on the Extract Class, Extract Superclass, Encapsulate Field and Pull up Method

Alazzam¹,

Abuata²,

Mhediat³

2020

IJMLC

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Refactoring is the key to improve software maintainability, reduce complexity and get clear code with the ability to understand and modify it in efficient way. In this paper we present four refactoring techniques which are: Extract Class, Extract Superclass, Encapsulate Field and Pull up Method to discover their effect on multi Object Oriented metrics and factors. The main objective of this study is to help the developers and maintenance engineers in choosing the best possible refactoring technique based on determined goals. The results demonstrate that the types of refactoring techniques have distinctive impact on the metrics values. The results show that all contemplated refactoring techniques increase the Cyclomatic number value (VG). However, the Encapsulate Field has no impact on: Coupling between Objects, Depth of Inheritance, Number of children and Outward Coupling metrics. Index Terms-Refactoring techniques, encapsulate field, pull up method.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of Refactoring on OO Metrics: A Study on the Extract Class, Extract Superclass, Encapsulate Field and Pull up Method

Alazzam¹,

Abuata²,

Mhediat³

2020

IJMLC

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“…Refactoring is a technique to restructure software by applying a series of methods without changing its observable behavior and to make software easier to understand and cheaper to modify [1]. Refactoring can improve the code quality of a software, including readability, reusability and maintainability [2][3][4]. Code extraction is one of the frequently-used refactoring skills and is also an important operating step for other complex refactoring methods, such as Extract Class, Replace Type Code with Subclasses, Replace Type Code with State/Strategy, Form Template Method, etc.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At present, most of the existing code extraction methods are based on Mark Weiser's program slicing [9][10] and follow three principles proposed by Nikolaos Tsantalis [11], that is, (1) for declared variables, the code segment extracted must include their complete calculation procedures, (2) the behaviors of the program before and after extraction must be consistent, and (3) the code segment extracted should not reappear in the method after extraction. Nikolaos Tsantalis divided program slices into two types: the complete computation slices and the object state slices.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Context-Aware Automatic Code Segment Extraction and Refactoring in Object-Oriented Systems

Liu¹

2018

IJPE

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Refactoring is a very important technology to improve the reusability and maintainability of existing code, and it is widely used in software development. In order to extract the code segment into a new method easily and cover the shortage of Eclipse in refactoring, the method of Context-Aware Automatic Code Segment Extraction and Refactoring (CAACSER) is proposed. By analyzing the context of the code, the input parameter class, and the output parameter class are introduced to handle complex code segments. The experimental results show that the CAACSER effectively solves some problems and drawbacks of many existing tools in code segment extraction, which acts as a basic step for realizing automatic and semi-automatic refactoring methods. The visualization tool of CAACSER can also carry out reasonable optimizations of the code without changing the systems' behaviors.

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“…A further challenge is that while it may appear that introducing design patterns, improving software quality metrics, and removing code smells are all noncompeting goals and hence can be simultaneously optimized, empirical evidence indicates otherwise. Studies by Soetens and Demeyer, Stroggylos and Spinellis, and Kannangara and Wijayanayake all found little or no correlation between refactoring activity and improvement in software quality metrics. In a similar vein, Wilking et al found that refactored code was neither more maintainable nor easier to modify than unrefactored versions of the same code.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

MORE: A multi‐objective refactoring recommendation approach to introducing design patterns and fixing code smells

Ouni

Kessentini

Cinnéide

et al. 2017

J Software Evolu Process

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Refactoring is widely recognized as a crucial technique applied when evolving object-oriented software systems. If applied well, refactoring can improve different aspects of software quality including readability, maintainability, and extendibility. However, despite its importance and benefits, recent studies report that automated refactoring tools are underused much of the time by software developers. This paper introduces an automated approach for refactoring recommendation, called MORE, driven by 3 objectives: (1) to improve design quality (as defined by software quality metrics), (2) to fix code smells, and (3) to introduce design patterns. To this end, we adopt the recent nondominated sorting genetic algorithm, NSGA-III, to find the best trade-off between these 3 objectives. We evaluated the efficacy of our approach using a benchmark of 7 medium and large open-source systems, 7 commonly occurring code smells (god class, feature envy, data class, spaghetti code, shotgun surgery, lazy class, and long parameter list), and 4 common design pattern types (visitor, factory method, singleton, and strategy). Our approach is empirically evaluated through a quantitative and qualitative study to compare it against 3 different state-of-the art approaches, 2 popular multiobjective search algorithms, and random search. The statistical analysis of the results confirms the efficacy of our approach in improving the quality of the studied systems while successfully fixing 84% of code smells and introducing an average of 6 design patterns. In addition, the qualitative evaluation shows that most of the suggested refactorings (an average of 69%) are considered by developers to be relevant and meaningful.

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An Empirical Evaluation of Impact of Refactoring on Internal and External Measures of Code Quality

Abstract: Refactoring is the process of improving the design of existing code by changing its internal

Cited by 14 publications

References 15 publications

Impact of Refactoring on OO Metrics: A Study on the Extract Class, Extract Superclass, Encapsulate Field and Pull up Method

Impact of Refactoring on OO Metrics: A Study on the Extract Class, Extract Superclass, Encapsulate Field and Pull up Method

Context-Aware Automatic Code Segment Extraction and Refactoring in Object-Oriented Systems

MORE: A multi‐objective refactoring recommendation approach to introducing design patterns and fixing code smells

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