Conflict-Aware Optimal Scheduling of Code Clone Refactoring: A Constraint Programming Approach

Duplicated code, also known as code clones, are one of the malicious `code smells´ that often need to be removed through refactoring for enhancing maintainability. Among all the potential refactoring opportunities, the choice and order of a set of refactoring activities may have distinguishable effect on the design/code quality. Moreover, there may be dependencies and conflicts among those refactorings. The organization may also impose priorities on certain refactoring activities. Addressing all these conflicts, priorities, and dependencies, manual formulation of an optimal refactoring schedule is very expensive, if not impossible. Therefore, an automated refactoring scheduler is necessary, which will maximize benefit and minimize refactoring effort. In this paper, we present a refactoring effort model, and propose a constraint programming approach for conflict-aware optimal scheduling of code clone refactoring.