Automating extract class refactoring: an improved method and its evaluation

During software evolution the internal structure of the system undergoes continuous modifications. These continuous changes push away the source code from its original design, often reducing its quality, including class cohesion. In this paper we propose a method for automating the Extract Class ref...

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Vydané v:Empirical software engineering : an international journal Ročník 19; číslo 6; s. 1617 - 1664
Hlavní autori: Bavota, Gabriele, De Lucia, Andrea, Marcus, Andrian, Oliveto, Rocco
Médium: Journal Article
Jazyk:English
Vydavateľské údaje: Boston Springer US 01.12.2014
Springer Nature B.V
Predmet:
Approximation
Automation
Cohesion
Compilers
Computer programs
Computer Science
Developers
Empirical analysis
Interpreters
Programming Languages
Software
Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems
Source code
Cohesion
Graph clustering algorithms
Coupling
Extract class refactoring
ISSN:1382-3256, 1573-7616
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Shrnutí:During software evolution the internal structure of the system undergoes continuous modifications. These continuous changes push away the source code from its original design, often reducing its quality, including class cohesion. In this paper we propose a method for automating the Extract Class refactoring. The proposed approach analyzes (structural and semantic) relationships between the methods in a class to identify chains of strongly related methods. The identified method chains are used to define new classes with higher cohesion than the original class, while preserving the overall coupling between the new classes and the classes interacting with the original class. The proposed approach has been first assessed in an artificial scenario in order to calibrate the parameters of the approach. The data was also used to compare the new approach with previous work. Then it has been empirically evaluated on real Blobs from existing open source systems in order to assess how good and useful the proposed refactoring solutions are considered by software engineers and how well the proposed refactorings approximate refactorings done by the original developers. We found that the new approach outperforms a previously proposed approach and that developers find the proposed solutions useful in guiding refactorings.
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ISSN:1382-3256
1573-7616
DOI:10.1007/s10664-013-9256-x