Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/26591
Title: On the Link between Refactoring Activity and Class Cohesion through the Prism of Two Cohesion-Based Metrics
Authors: Counsell, S
Destefanis, G
Swift, S
Arzoky, M
Taibi, D
Keywords: refactoring;coupling;metrics;empirical
Issue Date: 11-Dec-2020
Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Citation: Counsell, S. et al. (2020) 2020 IEEE 20th International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS), 2020, pp. 91 - 98. doi: 10.1109/QRS51102.2020.00024.
Abstract: The practice of refactoring has evolved over the past thirty years to become standard developer practice; for almost the same amount of time, proposals for measuring object-oriented cohesion have also been suggested. Yet, we still know very little about their inter-relationship empirically, despite the fact that classes exhibiting low cohesion would be strong candidates for refactoring. In this paper, we use a large set of refactorings to understand the characteristics of two cohesion metrics from a refactoring perspective. Firstly, through the well-known LCOM metric of Chidamber and Kemerer and, secondly, the C3 metric proposed more recently by Marcus et al. Our research question is motivated by the premise that different refactorings will be applied to classes with low cohesion compared with those applied to classes with high cohesion. We used three open-source systems as a basis of our analysis and on data from the lower and upper quartiles of metric data. Results showed that the set of refactoring types across both upper and lower quartiles was broadly the same, although very different in actual numbers. The `rename method' refactoring stood out from the rest, being applied over three times as often to classes with low cohesion than to classes with high cohesion.
URI: https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/26591
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/QRS51102.2020.00024
ISBN: 978-1-7281-8913-0
Other Identifiers: ORCID iDs: Steve Counsell https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2939-8919; Giuseppe Destefanis https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3982-6355; Steve Swift https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8918-3365; Mahir Arzoky https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2721-643X.
Appears in Collections:Dept of Computer Science Research Papers

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