Analysis of Refactoring Effect on Software Quality of Object-Oriented Systems

Abstract

Software industry primarily recognizes the significance of high quality, robust, reliable, and maintainable software. The industry always demands for efficient solutions that can improve the quality of software. Refactoring is one such potential solution; however, literature shows varied results of the application of refactoring techniques on software quality attributes. There are number of refactoring techniques that still needs to be empirically validated. This paper focuses on analyzing the effect of four unexplored refactoring techniques on different software quality attributes like coupling, cohesion, complexity, inheritance, reusability, and testability on object-oriented softwares. Impact analysis is performed by calculating Chidamber-Kemerer (CK) metrics of the projects, both before and after applying the refactoring techniques, and the results are statistically validated. Empirical analysis of results revealed that different refactoring techniques have different effects on internal and external quality attributes of object-oriented systems.