{"id":163533,"date":"2012-11-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-11-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/msr-research-item\/a-field-study-of-refactoring-challenges-and-benefits\/"},"modified":"2018-10-16T22:11:24","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T05:11:24","slug":"a-field-study-of-refactoring-challenges-and-benefits","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/a-field-study-of-refactoring-challenges-and-benefits\/","title":{"rendered":"A Field Study of Refactoring Challenges and Benefits"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"asset-content\">\n<p>It is widely believed that refactoring improves software quality and developer productivity. However, few empirical studies quantitatively assess refactoring benefits or investigate developers&#8217; perception towards these benefits. This paper presents a field study of refactoring benefits and challenges at Microsoft through three complementary study methods: a survey, semi-structured interviews with professional software engineers, and quantitative analysis of version history data. Our survey finds that the refactoring definition in practice is not confined to a rigorous definition of semantics-preserving code transformations and that developers perceive that refactoring involves substantial cost and risks. We also report on interviews with a designated refactoring team, which has led a multi-year, centralized effort on refactoring Windows. The quantitative analysis of Windows 7 version history finds that the binary modules refactored by this team experienced significant reduction in the number of inter-module dependencies and post-release defects, indicating a visible benefit of refactoring.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!-- .asset-content --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is widely believed that refactoring improves software quality and developer productivity. However, few empirical studies quantitatively assess refactoring benefits or investigate developers&#8217; perception towards these benefits. This paper presents a field study of refactoring benefits and challenges at Microsoft through three complementary study methods: a survey, semi-structured interviews with professional software engineers, and quantitative [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13560],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-163533","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-programming-languages-software-engineering","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.","msr_edition":"Proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 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