Refactoring planning and practice in agile software development: an empirical study

Abstract

Agile software engineering increasingly seeks to incorporate design modification and continuous refactoring in order to maintain code quality even in highly dynamic environments. However, there does not currently appear to be an industry-wide consensus on how to do this and research in this area expresses conflicting opinions. This paper presents an empirical study based upon an industry survey aimed at understanding the different ways that refactoring is thought of by the different people carrying out different roles in agile processes and how these different people weigh the importance of refactoring versus other kinds of tasks in the process. The study found good support for the importance of refactoring, but most respondents agreed that deferred refactoring impacts the agility of their process. Thus there was no universally agreed-upon strategy for planning refactoring. The survey findings also indicated that different roles have different perspectives on the different kinds of tasks in an agile process although all seem to want to increase the priority given to refactoring during planning for the iterations in agile development. Analysis of the survey raised many interesting questions suggesting the need for a considerable amount of future research.