Survey of Software Refactoring



This paper provides an extensive overview of existing research in the field of software refactoring. This research is compared and discussed based on a number of different criteria: the refactoring activities that are supported, the specific techniques and formalisms that are used for supporting these activities, the types of software artifacts that are being refactored, the important issues that need to be taken into account when building refactoring tool support, and the effect of refactoring on the software process. A running example is used throughout the paper to explain and illustrate the main concepts.

A N intrinsic property of software in a real-world environment is its need to evolve. As the software is enhanced, modified, and adapted to new requirements, the code becomes more complex and drifts away from its original design, thereby lowering the quality of the software. Because of this, the major part of the total software development cost is devoted to software maintenance [1], [2], [3]. Better software development methods and tools do not solve this problem because their increased capacity is used to implement more new requirements within the same time frame [4], making the software more complex again. To cope with this spiral of complexity, there is an urgent need for techniques that reduce software complexity by incrementally improving the internal software quality. The research domain that addresses this problem is referred to as restructuring [5], [79] or, in the specific case of objectoriented software development, refactoring [6], [7]. According to the taxonomy of Chikofsky and Cross [8], restructuring is defined as “the transformation from one representation form to another at the same relative abstraction level, while preserving the subject system’s external behavior (functionality and semantics). A restructuring transformation is often one of appearance, such as altering code to improve its structure in the traditional sense of structured design. While restructuring creates new versions that implement or propose change to the subject system, it does not normally involve modifications because of new requirements. However, it may lead to better observations of the subject system that suggest changes that would improve aspects of the system.” The term refactoring was originally introduced by Opdyke in his PhD dissertation [6]. Refactoring is basically the object-oriented variant of restructuring: “the process of changing a [object-oriented] software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behavior of the code, yet improves its internal structure” [7]. The key idea here is to redistribute classes, variables, and methods across the class hierarchy in order to facilitate future adaptations and extensions. In the context of software evolution, restructuring and refactoring are used to improve the quality of the software (e.g., extensibility, modularity, reusability, complexity, maintainability, efficiency). Refactoring and restructuring are also used in the context of reengineering [9], which is the examination and alteration of a subject system to reconstitute it in a new form and the subsequent implementation of the new form [8]. In this context, restructuring is needed to convert legacy code or deteriorated code into a more modular or structured form [10] or even to migrate code to a different programming language or even language paradigm

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