An Empirical Study on Refactoring Activity
This provides incremental insights for software engineering researchers and practitioners by validating or challenging prior empirical conclusions on refactoring patterns.
The paper tackled the problem of understanding refactoring activity in Java software systems, finding that refactoring is not always more frequent before major releases and confirming several existing assumptions about developer behavior and code quality.
This paper reports an empirical study on refactoring activity in three Java software systems. We investigated some questions on refactoring activity, to confirm or disagree on conclusions that have been drawn from previous empirical studies. Unlike previous empirical studies, our study found that it is not always true that there are more refactoring activities before major project release date than after. In contrast, we were able to confirm that software developers perform different types of refactoring operations on test code and production code, specific developers are responsible for refactorings in the project, refactoring edits are not very well tested. Further, floss refactoring is more popular among the developers, refactoring activity is frequent in the projects, majority of bad smells once occurred they persist up to the latest version of the system. By confirming assumptions by other researchers we can have greater confidence that those research conclusions are generalizable.