An Empirical Study of RefactoringChallenges and Benefits at Microsoft

It is widely believed that refactoring improves software quality and developer productivity. However, few empirical studies quantitatively assess refactoring benefits or investigate developers' perception towards these benefits. This paper presents a field study of refactoring benefits and chal...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on software engineering 2014-07, Vol.40 (7), p.633-649
Main Authors: Kim, Miryung, Zimmermann, Thomas, Nagappan, Nachiappan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Assessments
Complexity theory
Computer bugs
Computer programs
Definitions
Developers
Empirical analysis
Field study
History
Interviews
Perception
Perceptions
Quantitative analysis
Semantics
Size measurement
Software
Software engineering
Software metrics
Software quality
Transformations
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Summary:It is widely believed that refactoring improves software quality and developer productivity. However, few empirical studies quantitatively assess refactoring benefits or investigate developers' perception towards these benefits. This paper presents a field study of refactoring benefits and challenges at Microsoft through three complementary study methods: a survey, semi-structured interviews with professional software engineers, and quantitative analysis of version history data. Our survey finds that the refactoring definition in practice is not confined to a rigorous definition of semantics-preserving code transformations and that developers perceive that refactoring involves substantial cost and risks. We also report on interviews with a designated refactoring team that has led a multi-year, centralized effort on refactoring Windows. The quantitative analysis of Windows 7 version history finds the top 5 percent of preferentially refactored modules experience higher reduction in the number of inter-module dependencies and several complexity measures but increase size more than the bottom 95 percent. This indicates that measuring the impact of refactoring requires multi-dimensional assessment.
ISSN:0098-5589
1939-3520
DOI:10.1109/TSE.2014.2318734