Title
Automated scheduling for clone-based refactoring using a competent GA
Abstract
Refactoring is a widely accepted technique to improve the software quality by restructuring its design without changing its behavior. In general, a sequence of refactorings needs to be applied until the quality of the code is improved satisfactorily. In this case, the final design after refactoring can vary with the application order of refactorings, thereby producing different quality improvements. Therefore, it is necessary to determine a proper refactoring schedule to obtain as many benefits as possible. However, there is little research on the problem of generating appropriate schedules to maximize quality improvement. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically determine an appropriate schedule to maximize quality improvement through refactoring. We first detect code clones that are suitable for refactoring and generate the most beneficial refactoring schedule to remove them. It is straightforward to select the best from the exhaustively enumerated schedules. However, such a technique becomes NP-hard, as the number of available refactorings increases. We apply a genetic algorithm (GA) to generate the best refactoring schedule within a reasonable time to cope with this problem. We compare the GA-based approach with manual scheduling, greedy heuristic-based, and exhaustive approaches for four open systems. The results show that the proposed GA-based approach generates more beneficial schedules than the others. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1002/spe.1031
Softw., Pract. Exper.
Keywords
DocType
Volume
competent GA,beneficial schedule,exhaustively enumerated schedule,Automated scheduling,appropriate schedule,quality improvement,different quality improvement,GA-based approach,beneficial refactoring schedule,proper refactoring schedule,refactoring schedule,software quality,clone-based refactoring
Journal
41
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
5
0038-0644
23
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.67
27
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sukhee Lee1281.09
Gigon Bae2291.43
Heung Seok Chae332923.26
Doo-Hwan Bae478263.60
Yong Rae Kwon5103150.37