Prioritizing software refactoring opportunities using multi-objective optimization

Abstract

Software refactoring aims to improve software quality and developer productivity. It has gained significant attention from both academia and software industry. Therefore, numerous approaches have been proposed to automate refactoring that consider software quality maximization as their prime objective. However, this objective is not enough to generate good and efficient refactoring sequences as refactoring also involves several other uncertainties related to smell severity, history of applied refactoring activities and class severity. To address these concerns, we propose a multi-objective optimization approach to generate refactoring solutions that maximize the (1) software quality, (2) use of smell severity and (3) consistency with class importance. To this end, we use Multi-objective Spotted Hyena Optimizer (MOSHO) to obtain the best compromise between these three objectives. The proposed approach is evaluated on five open source datasets and its performance is compared with five different well-known state-of-the-art meta-heuristic and non-meta-heuristic approaches. The experimental results demonstrate that the refactoring solutions provided by MOSHO are significantly better than other algorithms when class importance and code smell severity scores are used.