An Empirical Study on Research and Developmental Opportunities in Refactoring Practices
Shivani Jain, Anju Saha · Proceedings/Proceedings of the ... International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering · 2019
Maintaining large complex software is one of the major challenges faced by today's software industry.Refactoring is one way to do so.It is the process of changing internal structure of project code or software design without altering functionality.It improves software quality and reduces software entropy.This paper presents the preliminary results of an explanatory survey targeted at investigating refactoring practices by IT professionals.221 participants helped to reveal important facts about refactoring risks, benefits, limitations of tools, and how a team manages consistency between different artefacts while practising refactoring.Findings reveal that refactoring tools are under-used as they have availability, usability and trust issues.An automated system is the need of the hour to manage change consistencies, visualizing code structures, detecting code, and design smells, and performing refactorings.This study will enable researchers and developers to understand their role in a better way as prevailing issues with current state-of-art are exposed and challenges are reported.