On the effects of refactoring in the coordination of software development activities

Abstract

Several empirical studies suggest that an alignment between the architecture of a software system and the coordination of development activities lead to better quality and improved performance. In this paper we investigate the possible effects of misalignments due to changes in the software architecture by describing the results of an exploratory study about the effects of refactoring in the coordination of software development activities in an open source project. We studied refactorings because they are perfect examples of changes in the software architecture. The project evaluated is the Jackrabbit, an Apache Software Foundation project. This project was analyzed using statistical tests and social networks analysis metrics. We evaluate different hypothesis regarding the impact of the refactoring process on project coordination. Initial results suggest that core software developers are especially affected by refactoring activities.