Are refactoring practices related to clusters in java software?

Abstract

Refactoring is widely used among the practices of Agile software development. In this preliminary work we present an empirical study carried out on several releases of 5 software systems written in Java. We focus our attention on the effect of refactoring activities on the topology of the software network. We find that refactoring activities involve classes linked together into clusters inside the software network and the clusters may be modified in different ways by the refactoring activity. This could lead to significative changes in source code, whose knowledge could be valuable for people involved in software development. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.