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access icon free Case study on software refactoring tactics

  • Author(s): Hui Liu 1, 2 ; Yang Liu 1 ; Guo Xue 1, 3 ; Yuan Gao 1
    • View affiliations
    • Affiliations: 1: School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, People's Republic of China;
      2: Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, (Peking University) Ministry of Education, Beijing 100871, People's Republic of China;
      3: Beijing Laboratory of Intelligent Information Technology, School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, People's Republic of China
  • Source: Volume 8, Issue 1, February 2014, p. 1 – 11
    DOI:  10.1049/iet-sen.2012.0121 , Print ISSN 1751-8806, Online ISSN 1751-8814
© The Institution of Engineering and Technology
Received 07/08/2012, Accepted 24/07/2013, Revised 21/06/2013, Published

Refactorings might be done using two different tactics: root canal refactoring and floss refactoring. Root canal refactoring is to set aside an extended period specially for refactoring. Floss refactoring is to interleave refactorings with other programming tasks. However, no large-scale case study on refactoring tactics is available. To this end, the authors carry out a case study to investigate the following research questions. (i) How often are root canal refactoring and floss refactoring employed, respectively? (ii) Are some kinds of refactorings more likely than others to be applied as floss refactorings or root canal refactorings? (iii) Do engineers employing both tactics have obvious bias to or against either of the tactics? They analyse the usage data information collected by Eclipse usage data collector. Results suggest that about 14% of refactorings are root canal refactorings. These findings reconfirm the hypothesis that, in general, floss refactoring is more common than root canal refactoring. The relative popularity of root canal refactoring, however, is much higher than expected. They also find that some kinds of refactorings are more likely than others to be performed as root canal refactorings. Results also suggest that engineers who have explored both tactics obviously tended towards root canal refactoring.

Inspec keywords: software maintenance; software quality; software process improvement

Other keywords: software refactoring tactics; rename method; extract method; software external behaviour preservation; Eclipse usage data collector; root canal refactoring; floss refactoring; usage data information; Eclipse UDC; refactoring density; software quality improvement

Subjects: Software engineering techniques

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