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2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

How Do Developers Refactor Code to Improve Code Reusability?

Authors : Eman Abdullah AlOmar, Philip T. Rodriguez, Jordan Bowman, Tianjia Wang, Benjamin Adepoju, Kevin Lopez, Christian Newman, Ali Ouni, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer

Published in: Reuse in Emerging Software Engineering Practices

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Refactoring is the de-facto practice to optimize software health. While there has been several studies proposing refactoring strategies to optimize software design through applying design patterns and removing design defects, little is known about how developers actually refactor their code to improve its reuse. Therefore, we extract, from 1,828 open source projects, a set of refactorings which were intended to improve the software reusability. We analyze the impact of reusability refactorings on state-of-the-art reusability metrics, and we compare the distribution of reusability refactoring types, with the distribution of the remaining mainstream refactorings. Overall, we found that the distribution of refactoring types, applied in the context of reusability, is different from the distribution of refactoring types in mainstream development. In the refactorings performed to improve reusability, source files are subject to more design level types of refactorings. Reusability refactorings significantly impact, high-level code elements, such as packages, classes, and methods, while typical refactorings, impact all code elements, including identifiers, and parameters.

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previous chapter How Does Library Migration Impact Software Quality and Comprehension? An Empirical Study

next chapter Analyzing the Impact of Refactoring Variants on Feature Location

https://smilevo.github.io/self-affirmed-refactoring/.

https://scitools.com/.

Regular expression was used to capture all expansions of reus such as reuses, reusing, reuse, etc.

Link to the commit: https://github.com/modelmapper/modelmapper/commit/6796071fc6ad98150b6faf654c8200164f977aa4.

https://scitools.com/features/.

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Title: How Do Developers Refactor Code to Improve Code Reusability?
Authors: Eman Abdullah AlOmar
Philip T. Rodriguez
Jordan Bowman
Tianjia Wang
Benjamin Adepoju
Kevin Lopez
Christian Newman
Ali Ouni
Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Reuse in Emerging Software Engineering Practices
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-64693-6

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-64694-3

Copyright Year: 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64694-3_16

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