Refactoring Debt: Myth or Reality? An Exploratory Study on the Relationship Between Technical Debt and Refactoring
0 likes335 views
The document explores the relationship between technical debt and refactoring, highlighting how intentional documentation of improvements can aid in debt repayment. It analyzes datasets from software repositories to determine the extent and types of technical debt resolved through various refactoring operations, demonstrating a high likelihood of debt removal. The findings support existing studies on the correlation between refactoring activities and technical debt repayment, opening avenues for further research in effective debt management.
Refactoring Debt: Myth or Reality? An Exploratory Study on the Relationship Between Technical Debt and Refactoring
- 1. Refactoring Debt: Myth or Reality? An Exploratory Study on the Relationship Between Technical Debt and Refactoring Anthony Peruma, Eman A. AlOmar, Christian D. Newman, Mohamed W. Mkaouer & Ali Ouni The 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories
- 2. Intentionally documenting improvements to the source code Self-Admitted Technical Debt Non-optimal code shipped to production Technical Debt
- 3. GOAL IMPACT RESEARCH QUESTIONS CONTRIBUTION Explore the repayment of technical debt through refactoring operations Provide developers and tool vendors with insight to improve code quality Extent of the removal of technical debt through refactoring Types of debt addressed through refactoring Dataset and discussion of the impact of refactoring and debt repayment
- 4. Source Dataset SmartSHARK MongoDB Release 2.1 (full version) Data Extraction ▪ SATD Removed Commits ▪ Refactoring Commits ▪ Refactoring Operations ▪ Hunks (Code Diffs) Quantitative Analysis Qualitative Analysis Custom Python Scripts Technical debt categories resolved via refactoring: ▪ Error Handling – Improve (or implement) error handling ▪ Code & Structural Improvements • Clean-up Activities – e.g., renaming identifiers • Design Improvements – e.g., moving code ▪ Feature Updates – Refactoring operations to incorporate/implement feature changes Greater likelihood of debt repayment through refactoring activities: • 76 of 77 systems have debt removal via refactoring • 76 systems have an Odds Ratio > 1 • Statistically significant difference in the number of refactoring operations applied to files Developers apply a variety of refactoring operations: • Extract Attribute is frequently applied multiple times followed by Change Variable Type
- 5. Potential Code Quality Tools: • Support for robust error handling – automatic detection of shortcomings in the code; customization of auto-generated try- catch blocks • Improving the accuracy of refactoring recommendations – considering the occurrence of SATD in the code • Aligns with existing studies showing a co-occurrence between debt repayment and refactoring actions • Opens the door for potential future work A more formal and exhaustive set of causes for repayment categories Conclusion & Takeaways