On the Relationship between Developer Experience and Refactoring: An Exploratory Study and Preliminary Results

Eman Abdullah Alomar, Anthony Peruma, Christian D. Newman, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Ali Ouni

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    13 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    Refactoring is one of the means of managing technical debt and maintaining a healthy software structure through enforcing best design practices, or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have shown that these code restructurings are mainly executed by developers who have sufficient knowledge of the system's design, and disposing of leadership roles in their development teams. However, these surveys were mainly limited to specific projects and companies. In this paper, we explore the generalizability of the previous results though analyzing 800 open-source projects. We mine their refactoring activities, and we identify their corresponding contributors. Then, we associate an expertise score to each contributor in order to test the hypothesis of whether developers with higher scores tend to perform a higher number of refactoring operations. We found that (1) although refactoring is not restricted to a subset of developers, those with higher experiences score tend to perform more refactorings than others; (2) our qualitative analysis of three randomly sampled projects show that the developers who are responsible for the majority of refactoring activities are typically on advanced positions in their development teams, demonstrating their extensive knowledge of the design of the systems they contribute to.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationProceedings - 2020 IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops, ICSEW 2020
    Pages342-349
    Number of pages8
    ISBN (Electronic)9781450379632
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 27 Jun 2020
    Event42nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops, ICSEW 2020 - Seoul, Korea, Republic of
    Duration: 27 Jun 202019 Jul 2020

    Publication series

    NameProceedings - 2020 IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops, ICSEW 2020

    Conference

    Conference42nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops, ICSEW 2020
    Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
    CitySeoul
    Period27/06/2019/07/20

    Keywords

    • Developer Experience
    • Quality
    • Software Refactoring
    • Software maintenance and evolution

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