Refactoring Debt: Myth or Reality? An Exploratory Study on the Relationship Between Technical Debt and Refactoring

May 5, 20220 likes298 views

Virtual presentation at: The 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR '22) Date of Conference: May 2022 Conference Location: Virtual Preprint: https://www.peruma.me/publication/2022-msr-debt/2022-MSR-DEBT.pdf

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

Intentionally documenting improvements
to the source code
Self-Admitted Technical Debt
Non-optimal code shipped to production
Technical Debt

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

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

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
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