How We Refactor, and How We Know It

Murphy-Hill, Emerson; Parnin, Chris; Black, Andrew P.

doi:10.1109/tse.2011.41

Cited by 421 publications

(348 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…This is a surprising result because TDD promotes short and frequent refactoring; whereas, in our case, it was postponed for several iterations. Moreover, floss-refactoring was shown to be the preferred refactoring tactic in larger studies (i.e., [63,64] ). However, in contrast with such studies, the legacy system the developers have been working on did not have any test, therefore hindering refactoring.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Findings from a multi-method study on test-driven development

Romano

Fucci

Scanniello

et al. 2017

Information and Software Technology

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a b s t r a c tContext: Test-driven development (TDD) is an iterative software development practice where unit tests are defined before production code. A number of quantitative empirical investigations have been conducted about this practice. The results are contrasting and inconclusive. In addition, previous studies fail to analyze the values, beliefs, and assumptions that inform and shape TDD. Objective: We present a study designed, and conducted to understand the values, beliefs, and assumptions about TDD. Participants were novice and professional software developers. Method: We conducted an ethnographically-informed study with 14 novice software developers, i.e., graduate students in Computer Science at the University of Basilicata, and six professional software developers (with one to 10 years work experience). The participants worked on the implementation of a new feature for an existing software written in Java. We immersed ourselves in the context of our study. We collected qualitative information by means of audio recordings, contemporaneous field notes, and other kinds of artifacts. We collected quantitative data from the integrated development environment to support or refute the ethnography results. Results: The main insights of our study can be summarized as follows: (i) refactoring (one of the phases of TDD) is not performed as often as the process requires and it is considered less important than other phases, (ii) the most important phase is implementation, (iii) unit tests are almost never up-to-date, and (iv) participants first build in their mind a sort of model of the source code to be implemented and only then write test cases. The analysis of the quantitative data supported the following qualitative findings: (i), (iii) , and (iv) . Conclusions: Developers write quick-and-dirty production code to pass the tests, do not update their tests often, and ignore refactoring.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Findings from a multi-method study on test-driven development

Romano

Fucci

Scanniello

et al. 2017

Information and Software Technology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…The analysis of Windows 7 version history confirmed code quality improvements after refactoring, involving reduction of inter-module dependencies and post-release defects. Murphy-Hill et al accomplished most likely the largest experiment of software refactoring, spanning 13,000 developers and 2500 development hours (Murphy-Hill et al 2012). Their intent is not to measure quality improvement but to study how developers approach the refactoring process.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing refactorings for usability in e-commerce applications

et al. 2015

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Refactoring has been reported as a helpful technique to systematically improve nonfunctional attributes of software. This paper evaluates the relevance of refactoring for improving usability on web applications. We conducted an experiment with two replications at different locations, with subjects of different profiles. Objects chosen for the experiment were two e-commerce applications that exhibit common business processes in today's web usage. Through the experiment we found that half of the studied refactorings cause a significant improvement in usability. The rest of the refactorings required a post-hoc analysis in which we Empir Software Eng considered aspects like user expertise in the interaction with web applications or type of application. We conclude that, when improving quality in use, the success of the refactoring process depends on several factors, including the type of software system, context and users. We have analyzed all these aspects, which developers must consider for a better decision support at the time of prioritizing improvements and outweighing effort.

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“…Empirical studies related to the use of refactoring have found that it can improve maintainability (Kolb et al, 2005;Moser et al, 2006). Not only does existing work suggest that refactoring is useful and important, but it also suggests that refactoring is a frequent practice (Murphy-Hill et al, 2012).…”

Section: Peixe-espada Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, perfective maintenance usually demands high product knowledge and high effort, which go against labor turnover and tight schedule, forcing companies to postpone it indefinitely. In addition, performing perfective maintenance by hand is an error-prone and expensive activity (Murphy-Hill et al, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%