Impact of Clone Refactoring on External Quality Attributes of Open Source Softwares

Abstract

Code refactoring is a “Process of restructuring an existing source code.”. It also helps in improving the internal structure of the code without really affecting its external behaviour”. It changes a source code in such a way that it does not alter the external behaviour yet still it improves its internal structure. It is a way to clean up code that minimizes the chances of introducing bugs. Refactoring is a change made to the internal structure of a software component to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify, without changing the observable behaviour of that software component. Bad smells indicate that there is something wrong in the code that have to refactor. There are different tools that are available to identify and emove these bad smells. A software has two types of quality attributes- Internal and external. In this paper we will study the effect of clone refactoring on software quality attributes.