Behind the scenes: On the relationship between developer experience and refactoring

Abstract

Refactoring is widely recognized as one of the efficient techniques to manage technical debt and maintain a healthy software project through enforcing best design practices, or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have shown that code refactoring activities are mainly executed by developers who have sufficient knowledge of the system's design, and disposing of leadership roles in their development teams. However, these surveys were mainly limited to specific projects and companies. In this paper, we explore the generalizability of the previous results by analyzing 800 open‐source projects. We mine their refactoring activities, and we identify their corresponding contributors. Then, we associate an experience score to each contributor in order to test various hypotheses related to whether developers with higher scores tend to (1) perform a higher number of refactoring operations, (2) exhibit different motivations behind their refactoring, and (3) better document their refactoring activity. We found that (1) although refactoring is not restricted to a subset of developers, those with higher contribution scores tend to perform more refactorings than others; (2) although there is no correlation between experience and motivation behind refactoring, top contributed developers are found to perform a wider variety of refactoring operations, regardless of their complexity; and (3) top contributed developer tend to document less their refactoring activity. Our qualitative analysis of three randomly sampled projects shows that the developers who are responsible for the majority of refactoring activities are typically in advanced positions in their development teams, demonstrating their extensive knowledge of the design of the systems they contribute to.

Test smell refactoring revisited: What can internal quality attributes and developers’ experience tell us?

“…We selected developers with skills other than project experiences, such as Java programming experience and quality attributes ranging from basic to advanced. AlOmar et al (2020AlOmar et al ( , 2021 conducted an empirical study to identify contributors to production code and test code and associated a score for each contributor's experience with the number of recent commits (across commit authors and source files that were changed) over the past three years in refactoring activities across 800 open source projects hosted on GitHub. As a result, refactoring does not limit only a subset of developers.…”

Towards Better Understanding Developer Perception of Refactoring

“…• In our research (ESEM2019 [15], ICSR2020 [16], ESWA2020 [17], IWoR2020 [18], JSEP2021 [19], ISSE2021 [20]), we augmented our understanding of the development contexts that trigger refactoring activities and enable future research to take development contexts into account more effectively when studying refactorings. • In our research (ICSE2021 [21], MSR2022 [22],…”

CIRef: A Tool for Visualizing the Historical Data of Software Refactorings in Java Projects

“…Furthermore, existing tools often lack diverse visualizations of refactorings, which are crucial for promoting increased adoption of refactoring practices in projects [6]. AlOmar et al [5] identified that developers who are responsible for the majority of refactorings in a project tend to document less of their refactoring activities compared to developers who perform refactorings sporadically. This suggests that the currently existing tools do not support the developers who perform the most refactorings.…”