Assessing refactoring instances and the maintainability benefits of them from version archives

Abstract

For the development of high quality software, process quality assessment should be applied into development organization. So far, several process quality assessment methodologies are proposed and applied into a lot of organizations. In this paper, we propose an approach to assess instances of refactoring that is one of the key processes for quality improvement. The proposed approach can be done semi-automatically by investigating version archives in a configuration management system. We applied our proposed method to the Columba project which is an open source software project. The result of our preliminary case study shows that the frequency of defect introduction tends to decrease in the term after frequent refactoring. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.