Assessing the impact of refactoring activities on the JHotDraw project

Authors:
Ishwor Thapa;Harvey Siy
Affiliations:
University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, Nebraska;University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, Nebraska
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
Year:
2010

Citing 3
Cited 0

Refactoring: improving the design of existing code

Refactoring: improving the design of existing code
Ranking Significance of Software Components Based on Use Relations

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
A segmentation-based approach for temporal analysis of software version repositories

Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice

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Abstract

Refactoring is a well-known technique for improving the maintainability of software products. However, it is not easy to justify the time and effort needed to refactor code as the benefits are difficult to quantify, especially the perception of improved maintainability. In this paper, we highlight some results of a retrospective case study undertaken to shed light on how refactoring affects maintainability of a software product. There are several findings. First of all, refactoring affects the amount of subsequent changes. Furthermore, refactoring has a positive impact on the coupling relationships with dependent software applications.