Title
How do Java methods grow?
Abstract
Overly long methods hamper the maintainability of software - they are hard to understand and to change, but also difficult to test, reuse, and profile. While technically there are many opportunities to refactor long methods, little is known about their origin and their evolution. It is unclear how much effort should be spent to refactor them and when this effort is spent best. To obtain a maintenance strategy, we need a better understanding of how software systems and their methods evolve. This paper presents an empirical case study on method growth in Java with nine open source and one industry system. We show that most methods do not increase their length significantly; in fact, about half of them remain unchanged after the initial commit. Instead, software systems grow by adding new methods rather than by modifying existing methods.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/SCAM.2015.7335411
2015 IEEE 15th International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Java method,software maintainability,maintenance strategy
Maintenance strategy,Programming language,Software engineering,Commit,Reuse,Computer science,Software system,Software,Java,Code refactoring,Maintainability
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1942-5430
0
0.34
References 
Authors
21
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Daniela Steidl130.87
Florian Deissenboeck277035.84