Challenges to and Solutions for Refactoring Adoption: An Industrial Perspective

Sharma, Tushar; Suryanarayana, Girish; Samarthyam, Ganesh

doi:10.1109/ms.2015.105

Cited by 39 publications

(30 citation statements)

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“…Although existing research provided tools for the identification of refactoring opportunities or the automatic or semi-automatic applications of refactorings or even for their prioritization, most of these tools do not assess or predict the impact of refactoring activities on software quality. Therefore, without understanding the effect of a change caused by a particular refactoring in software quality, schedule-bound industry practitioners feel reluctant to adopt refactoring because of perceived cost, effort and time intensive outcome of refactoring [16,34]. To address these concerns, RQ3 targets such tools that provide the prediction or assessment of the benefits of applying refactoring activities.…”

Section: Research Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, software developers want to assess only the changed parts of the source code. Although, there exist many refactoring tools that identify refactoring opportunities or perform refactoring activities, these tools cannot run only on the differential source code [16]. This led us to the conclusion that development of the updated tools to predict or assess the actual benefits of refactoring activities is an open research area.…”

Section: Refactoring Impact Prediction Tool (Rq3)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These days, almost all the most popular IDEs available provide a considerable support for refactoring. But, these IDEs do not generally assist in measuring or predicting the effects of refactoring activities on software quality, which results in one of the major roadblocks in adopting refactoring practices in software industry [16,84]. Therefore, researchers are suggested to develop IDE plugins for estimating the impact of applying specific refactoring activities on quality of the software under development.…”

Section: Refactoring Impact Prediction Tool (Rq3)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 1. Various industry practitioners are oblivious to the impact of refactoring activities on software quality.Consequently, while performing any refactoring activity, they feel reluctant as they believe refactoring may either break the code or result in the wastage of resources [16][17]. Their concerns can be attributed to the scarcity of appropriate sources that discuss state-of-the-art of software refactoring process and its benefits in a lucid manner.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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How does object-oriented code refactoring influence software quality? Research landscape and challenges

Kaur

Singh

2019

Journal of Systems and Software

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Context: Software refactoring aims to improve software quality and developer productivity. Numerous empirical studies investigating the impact of refactoring activities on software quality have been conducted over the last two decades.Objective: This study aims to perform a comprehensive systematic mapping study of existing empirical studies on evaluation of the effect of object-oriented code refactoring activities on software quality attributes. Method:We followed a multi-stage scrutinizing process to select 142 primary studies published till December 2017. The selected primary studies were further classified based on several aspects to answer the research questions defined for this work. In addition, we applied vote-counting approach to combine the empirical results and their analysis reported in primary studies. Results:The findings indicate that studies conducted in academic settings found more positive impact of refactoring on software quality than studies performed in industries. In general, refactoring activities caused all quality attributes to improve or degrade except for cohesion, complexity, inheritance, fault-proneness and power consumption attributes. Furthermore, individual refactoring activities have variable effects on most quality attributes explored in primary studies, indicating that refactoring does not always improve all quality attributes. Conclusions:This study points out several open issues which require further investigation, e.g., lack of industrial validation, lesser coverage of refactoring activities, limited tool support, etc.Keywords: Software quality, object-oriented software, refactoring activity, quality measures, systematic mapping study.© 2019. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 1. Various industry practitioners are oblivious to the impact of refactoring activities on software quality.Consequently, while performing any refactoring activity, they feel reluctant as they believe refactoring may either break the code or result in the wastage of resources [16][17]. Their concerns can be attributed to the scarcity of appropriate sources that discuss state-of-the-art of software refactoring process and its benefits in a lucid manner. Hence, this paper reports an in-depth systematic mapping study (SMS) to analyse, synthesize and present the empirical findings related to the effect of refactoring activities targeting code smells on software quality. Awareness about the effect of planned refactoring changes on software quality will boost the confidence of developers in exercising software refactoring as regular development practice. 2. Retrospectively, it is observed that so far there have been only four literature surveys covering the relationship between refactoring and software quality. Among them, three [18][19][20] partially and one comprehensively (Dallal and Abdin; published in 2017 covering the literature till 2015) [21] explored the impact of refactoring activities on object-oriented softw...

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Section: Research Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Refactoring Impact Prediction Tool (Rq3)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Refactoring Impact Prediction Tool (Rq3)mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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How does object-oriented code refactoring influence software quality? Research landscape and challenges

Kaur

Singh

2019

Journal of Systems and Software

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“…Keeping the software maintainable is a non-trivial challenge for software development teams given the real-life challenges (such as time pressure) [21]. The final part of the session deals with such challenges and present actionable and pragmatic strategies and practices for practitioners to avoid, detect, and eradicate smells from their codebase.…”

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confidence: 99%

Detecting and managing code smells

Sharma

2018

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceeedings

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Code smells indicate the presence of quality problems that make the software hard to maintain and evolve. A software development team can keep their software maintainable by identifying smells and refactor them. In the first part of the session, we present a comprehensive overview of the literature concerning smells covering various dimensions of the metaphor including defining characteristics, classification, types, as well as causes and impacts of smells. In the second part, we delve into the details of smell detection methods prevailed currently both in research prototypes and industrial tools. The final part present actionable and pragmatic strategies for practitioners to avoid, detect, and eradicate smells from their codebase. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Maintaining software; Software maintenance tools;

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A study of refactorings during software change tasks

Eilertsen

Murphy

2021

J Software Evolu Process

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Developers frequently undertake software change tasks that could be partially or fully automated by refactoring tools. As has been reported by others, all too often, these refactoring steps are instead performed manually by developers. These missed opportunities are referred to as occasions of disuse of refactoring tools. We perform an observational study in which 17 developers with professional experience attempt to solve three change tasks with steps amenable to the use of refactoring tools. We found that the strategies developers use to approach these tasks shape their workflow, which, in turn, shape the opportunities for refactoring tool use. We report on a number of findings about developer strategies, demonstrating the difficulty of aligning the kind of refactoring steps that emerge during a change task based on the strategy with the tools available. We also report on findings about refactoring tools, such as the difficulties developers face in controlling the scope of application of the tools. Our findings can help inform the designers of refactoring tools.

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Challenges to and Solutions for Refactoring Adoption: An Industrial Perspective

Cited by 39 publications

References 6 publications

How does object-oriented code refactoring influence software quality? Research landscape and challenges

How does object-oriented code refactoring influence software quality? Research landscape and challenges

Detecting and managing code smells

A study of refactorings during software change tasks

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