How Do Developers Refactor Code to Improve Code Reusability?

AlOmar, Eman Abdullah; Rodriguez, Philip T.; Bowman, Jordan; Wang, Tianjia; Adepoju, Benjamin; Lopez, Kevin; Newman, Christian D.; Ouni, Ali; Mkaouer, Mohamed Wiem

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-64694-3_16

Cited by 18 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…For instance, developers refactor the code to improve its reusability. More recently, AlOmar et al [31] show that the number of methods significantly increases when developers refactor the code to improve reusability. Also, developers make changes such as extracting methods to improve testability as they test parts of the code separately.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Do I Refactor This? An Empirical Study on Refactoring Trends and Topics in Stack Overflow

Peruma,

Simmons,

AlOmar

et al. 2021

Preprint

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An essential part of software maintenance and evolution, refactoring is performed by developers, regardless of technology or domain, to improve the internal quality of the system, and reduce its technical debt. However, choosing the appropriate refactoring strategy is not always straightforward, resulting in developers seeking assistance. Although research in refactoring is well-established, with several studies altering between the detection of refactoring opportunities and the recommendation of appropriate code changes, little is known about their adoption in practice. Analyzing the perception of developers is critical to understand better what developers consider to be problematic in their code and how they handle it. Additionally, there is a need for bridging the gap between refactoring, as research, and its adoption in practice, by extracting common refactoring intents that are more suitable for what developers face in reality.In this study, we analyze refactoring discussions on Stack Overflow through a series of quantitative and qualitative experiments. Our results show that Stack Overflow is utilized by a diverse set of developers for refactoring assistance for a variety of technologies. Our observations show five areas that developers typically require help with refactoring-Code Optimization, Tools and IDEs, Architecture and Design Patterns, Unit Testing, and Database. We envision our findings better bridge the support between traditional (or academic) aspects of refactoring and their real-world applicability, including better tool support.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Do I Refactor This? An Empirical Study on Refactoring Trends and Topics in Stack Overflow

Peruma,

Simmons,

AlOmar

et al. 2021

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Table 5 shows five motivations that drive developers to refactor their code. The refactoring categories have been defined by reviewing the literature on refactoring motivation 42,23,20,43,37,44,45,46,33,47 . To cover all of the existing motivations, the authors clustered the existing refactoring taxonomy reported in the literature into five categories.…”

Section: Commit Classification Model Constructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Relationship Between Developer Experience and Refactoring

AlOmar

Peruma

Newman

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops

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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 score tend to perform more refactorings than others; (2) while 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 show 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.

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“…(Paixão et al, 2020) perform an empirical study on refactoring activities in code review in which they captured Bug Fix and Feature refactoring categories. (AlOmar et al, 2020c) studied how developers refactor their code to improve its reuse by analyzing the impact of reusability refactorings on the state-of-the-art reusability metrics. Figure 1 depicts how our classification clusters the existing refactoring taxonomy reported in the literature (Moser et al, 2006(Moser et al, , 2007Tsantalis et al, 2013;Kim et al, 2014;Silva et al, 2016;Palomba et al, 2017;Vassallo et al, 2019;AlOmar et al, 2019b;Pantiuchina et al, 2020;Paixão et al, 2020;AlOmar et al, 2020c).…”

Section: Refactoring Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

How We Refactor and How We Document it? On the Use of Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms to Classify Refactoring Documentation

AlOmar,

Peruma,

Mkaouer

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

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Refactoring is the art of improving the structural design of a software system without altering its external behavior. Today, refactoring has become a well established and disciplined software engineering practice that has attracted a significant amount of research presuming that refactoring is primarily motivated by the need to improve system structures. However, recent studies have shown that developers may incorporate refactoring strategies in other development-related activities that go beyond improving the design especially with the emerging challenges in contemporary software engineering. Unfortunately, these studies are limited to developer interviews and a reduced set of projects.To cope with the above-mentioned limitations, we aim to better understand what motivates developers to apply a refactoring by mining and automatically classifying a large set of 111,884 commits containing refactoring activities, extracted from 800 open source Java projects. We trained a multi-class classifier to categorize these commits into three categories, namely, Internal Quality Attribute, External Quality Attribute, and Code Smell Resolution, along with the traditional Bug Fix and Functional categories. This classification challenges the original definition of refactoring, being exclusive to improving software design and fixing code smells. Furthermore, to better understand our classification results, we qualitatively analyzed commit messages to extract textual patterns that developers regularly use to describe their refactoring activities.The results of our empirical investigation show that (1) fixing code smells is not the main driver for developers to refactoring their code bases. Refactoring is solicited for a wide variety of reasons, going beyond its traditional definition;(2) the distribution of refactoring operations differ between production and test files; (3) developers use a variety of patterns to purposefully target refactoring- *

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How Do Developers Refactor Code to Improve Code Reusability?

Cited by 18 publications

References 16 publications

How Do I Refactor This? An Empirical Study on Refactoring Trends and Topics in Stack Overflow

How Do I Refactor This? An Empirical Study on Refactoring Trends and Topics in Stack Overflow

On the Relationship Between Developer Experience and Refactoring

How We Refactor and How We Document it? On the Use of Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms to Classify Refactoring Documentation

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