Quality Assessment for Primary Studies on Identifying Refactoring Opportunities in Object-Oriented Code

Abstract

Refactoring is a maintenance task that refers to the process of restructuring software source code to enhance its quality without affecting its external behavior. Manually inspecting and analyzing the source code of the system under consideration to identify refactoring opportunities are time consuming and costly process. Researchers typically propose fully or semi-automated techniques to predict or identify the refactoring opportunities. In the present study, we demonstrate an application for a proposed framework that assesses the quality of the studies reported in the published primary studies (PSs) on the refactoring prediction/ identification techniques. The framework is applied on 47 selected PSs to assess the quality of the studies based on their design, conduct, analysis, and conclusion. We used the results to comment on the weakness of the existing PSs and the issues that have to be considered with much attention in the future studies.