Trends in Java code changes

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Trends in Java code changes: the key to identification of refactorings?

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ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 42 archive
Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Principles and practice of programming in Java table of contents

Kilkenny City, Ireland

SESSION: Software engineering table of contents

Pages: 45 - 48

Year of Publication: 2003

ISBN:0-9544145-1-9

Authors

Steve Counsell	University of London, London
Youssef Hassoun	University of London, London
Roger Johnson	University of London, London
Keith Mannock	University of London, London
Emilia Mendes	University of Auckland, New Zealand

Publisher

Computer Science Press, Inc. New York, NY, USA

Bibliometrics

Downloads (6 Weeks): 4, Downloads (12 Months): 68, Citation Count: 4

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ABSTRACT

Changes made to object-oriented (OO) systems over time provide an insight into both design robustness and changes in requirements. When expressed at a high level of abstraction, observing trends in changes to code can indicate opportunities for refactoring at the architectural level. In this paper, we empirically investigate the changes made to a set of fifty-two Java library classes over a three year period. The research attempts to support the hypothesis that certain types of changes made to Java code fall into distinct trends and, furthermore, are likely to be made at a high level of abstraction; in this case to method signatures. Our empirical results show that change trends are identifiable thus informing well-known refactorings, but not as we had envisaged. Control logic constructs were found to be the focus of most changes to the library classes examined.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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	2	P. Clarke and B. Malloy. A taxonomy of classes to identify changes during maintenance. In Proceedings of the 1st Annual Conference on Computer and Information Sciences (ICIS'02), South Korea, August, pages 631--636, 2002.
	3	S. Counsell, G. Loizou, R. Najjar, and K. Mannock. On the relationship between encapsulation, inheritance and friends in C++ software. In Proceedings of International Conference on Software and Systems Engineering and their Applications, ICSSEA'02, Paris, France, 2002.
	4	Refactoring: improving the design of existing code, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1999
	5	Peter Clarke , Brian Malloy , Paul Gibson, Using a Taxonomy Tool to Identify Changes in OO Software, Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, p.213, March 26-28, 2003
	6	J. Kerievsky. Refactoring to patterns. In Technical Report from Industrial Logic, found at www.industriallogic.com, 2002.
	7	R. Najjar , S. Counsell , G. Loizou , K. Mannock, The Role of Constructors in the Context of Refactoring Object-Oriented Systems, Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, p.111, March 26-28, 2003
	8	William F. Opdyke, Refactoring object-oriented frameworks, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, 1992

CITED BY 4

	Sunghun Kim , E. James Whitehead , Jennifer Bevan, Analysis of signature change patterns, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, v.30 n.4, July 2005
	S. Counsell , Y. Hassoun , G. Loizou , R. Najjar, Common refactorings, a dependency graph and some code smells: an empirical study of Java OSS, Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/IEEE international symposium on International symposium on empirical software engineering, September 21-22, 2006, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
	Deepak Advani , Youssef Hassoun , Steve Counsell, Extracting refactoring trends from open-source software and a possible solution to the 'related refactoring' conundrum, Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Applied computing, April 23-27, 2006, Dijon, France
	Steve Counsell , Rob M. Hierons, Refactoring test suites versus test behaviour: a TTCN-3 perspective, Fourth international workshop on Software quality assurance: in conjunction with the 6th ESEC/FSE joint meeting, September 03-04, 2007, Dubrovnik, Croatia