An Experimental Investigation on the Innate Relationship between Quality and Refactoring

Nevertheless, the existing literature lacks of observations about the relations between metrics/code smells and refactoring operations performed by de- velopers.

In other words, the characteristics of code components pushing developers to refactor them are still unknown. This paper aims at bridging this gap by analyzing which code characteristics trigger the developers refactoring attentions. Specifically, we mined the evolution history of three Java open source projects to investigate whether developers refactoring activities occur on code components for which cer- tain indicators—such as quality metrics or the presence of smells as detected by tools—suggest there might be need for refactoring operations.