Describing the impact of refactoring on internal program quality
Bart Du Bois, Tom Mens · 2003
The technique of refactoring -- restructuring the source-code of an object-oriented program without changing its external behavior -- has been embraced by many object-oriented software developers as a way to accommodate changing requirements. The overall goal of refactoring is to improve the maintainability of software. Unfortunately, it is unclear how specific quality factors are affected. Therefore, this paper proposes a formalism to describe the impact of a representative number of refactorings on an AST representation of the source code, extended with cross-references. We elicitate how internal program quality metrics can be formally defined on top of this program structure representation, and demonstrate how to project the impact of refactorings on these internal program quality metric values in the form of potential drifts or improvements.