Title | Studying the Effect of Refactorings: a Complexity Metrics Perspective |
Publication Type | Conference Paper |
Year of Publication | 2010 |
Authors | Soetens, QD, Demeyer S |
Conference Name | QUATIC 2010: The 7th International Conference on Quality in Information and Communications Technology |
Publisher | IEEE Computer Society Press |
ISBN Number | 978-0-7695-4241-6 |
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. |
URL | http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/QUATIC.2010.58 |
DOI | http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/QUATIC.2010.58 |