Does refactoring improve reusability?

Authors:
Raimund Moser;Alberto Sillitti;Pekka Abrahamsson;Giancarlo Succi
Affiliations:
Center for Applied Software Engineering, Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, Italy;Center for Applied Software Engineering, Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, Italy;VTT Electronics, Oulu, Finland;Center for Applied Software Engineering, Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, Italy
Venue:
ICSR'06 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Reuse of Off-the-Shelf Components
Year:
2006

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Abstract

The improvement of the software development process through the development and utilization of high quality and reusable software components has been advocated for a long time. Agile Methods promote some interesting practices, in particular the practice of refactoring, which are supposed to improve understandability and maintainability of source code. In this research we analyze if refactoring promotes ad-hoc reuse of object-oriented classes by improving internal quality metrics. We conduct a case study in a close-to industrial, agile environment in order to analyze the impact of refactoring on internal quality metrics of source code. Our findings sustain the hypothesis that refactoring enhances quality and reusability of – otherwise hard to reuse – classes in an agile development environment. Given such promising results, additional experimentation is required to validate and generalize the results of this work.