Studying the Effect of Refactorings: A Complexity Metrics Perspective

Author

Soetens, Quinten David ; Demeyer, Serge

Author_Institution

Dept. of Math. & Comput. Sci., Univ. of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

fYear

2010

fDate

Sept. 29 2010-Oct. 2 2010

Firstpage

313

Lastpage

318

Abstract

Refactoring is widely recognized as a way to improve the internal structure of a software system in order to ensure its long-term maintainability. Consequently, software projects which adopt refactoring practices should see reductions in the complexity of their code base. We evaluated this assumption on an open source system-namely PMD, a Java source code analyzer-and discovered that periods of refactorings did not affect the cyclomatic complexity. This paper investigates this counterintuitive phenomenon through a detailed analysis of the actual source code manipulations applied on the system under study.

Keywords

Java; public domain software; software maintenance; software management; software metrics; source coding; Java source code analyzer; complexity metrics perspective; cyclomatic complexity; internal structure; long-term maintainability; open source system; refactorings; software projects; software system; Complexity theory; Couplings; Java; Mathematical analysis; Measurement; Software systems; Complexity; Maintenance; Mining Software Repositories; Refactoring; Software Evolution;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Quality of Information and Communications Technology (QUATIC), 2010 Seventh International Conference on the

Conference_Location

Porto

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-8539-0

Electronic_ISBN

978-0-7695-4241-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/QUATIC.2010.58

Filename

5655673