Studying the Effect of Refactorings: a Complexity Metrics Perspective

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

Last modified: Sun, 2011-09-04 21:24