Do automatic refactorings improve maintainability? An industrial case study

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

doi:10.1109/icsm.2015.7332494

Cited by 16 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Interviews with the developers revealed that they found it to be easy to work with the tool in a lots of situations and they intend to keep using it in the future. An in-depth analysis of the results was discussed in a previous study [30] and a summary of our observations is available as an experience report [28].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

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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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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…Generating only the required code parts created nearly the same code as the original, with most indentation and whitespaces in the right place. This was an important request from developers because interviews showed that they did not want to bother with fixing the indentation [30].…”

Section: Keeping Track Of Modificationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automating the Refactoring Process

Szőke¹

2017

Acta Cybern

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“…On the other hand, if we just focus on maintainability, it has been positively linked to design patterns by Hegedűs et al [11], refactorings by Szőke et al [24], and version history metrics by Faragó et al [6].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Connection between Antipatterns and Maintainability in Firefox

Bán¹

2017

Acta Cybern

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The notion that antipatterns have a detrimental effect on source code maintainability is widely accepted, but there is relatively little objective evidence to support it. We seek to investigate this issue by analyzing the connection between antipatterns and maintainability in an empirical study of Firefox, an open source browser application developed in C++. After extracting antipattern instances and maintainability information from 45 revisions, we looked for correlations to uncover a connection between the two concepts. We found statistically significant negative values for both Pearson and Spearman correlations, most of which were under -0.65. These values suggest there are strong, inverse relationships, thereby supporting our initial assumption that the more antipatterns the source code contains, the harder it is to maintain. Lastly, we combined these data into a table applicable for machine learning experiments, which we conducted using Weka [10] and several of its classifier algorithms. All five regression types we tried had correlation coefficients over 0.77 and used mostly negative weights for the antipattern predictors in the models we constructed. In conclusion, we can say that this empirical study is another step towards objectively demonstrating that antipatterns have an adverse effect on software maintainability.

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“…We found that the effect of a single transformation usually has an unbalanced positive/negative effect on one or more quality attributes, but when developers applied them en masse, it always had a beneficial effect on the maintainability of the code. Later, in the automatic refactoring phase, we found that developers tend to have a different behavior when they use automatic tools (e.g., they accept a solution recommended by the tool even if manually they would probably do something else), so we examined the automatic transformations as well [14]. In a recent tool demo paper [15], we described the architecture of the tools developed in the project.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing and Developing Automated Refactoring Transformations: An Experience Report

Szőke

Nagy

Ferenć

et al. 2016

2016 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER)

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Abstract-There are several challenges which should be kept in mind during the design and development phases of a refactoring tool, and one is that developers have several expectations that are quite hard to satisfy. In this report, we present our experiences of a two-year project where we attempted to create an automatic refactoring tool. In this project, we worked with five software development companies that wanted to improve the maintainability of their products. The project was designed to take into account the expectations of the developers of these companies and consisted of three main stages: a manual refactoring phase, a tool building phase, and an automatic refactoring phase. Throughout these stages we collected the opinions of the developers and faced several challenges on how to automate refactoring transformations, which we present and summarize.

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Do automatic refactorings improve maintainability? An industrial case study

Cited by 16 publications

References 26 publications

Automating the Refactoring Process

Automating the Refactoring Process

The Connection between Antipatterns and Maintainability in Firefox

Designing and Developing Automated Refactoring Transformations: An Experience Report

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