research-article

An Automated Refactoring Approach to Remove Unnecessary Complexity in Source Code

Authors:

Nathan Manera Magalhães,

Heleno de Souza Campos Junior,

Marco Antônio Pereira Araújo,

Vânia de Oliveira NevesAuthors Info & Claims

SAST '17: Proceedings of the 2nd Brazilian Symposium on Systematic and Automated Software Testing

Article No.: 3, Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/3128473.3128476

Published: 18 September 2017 Publication History

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Abstract

Programming apprentices may choose to prioritize the correct functioning of a source code without focusing on their quality, making them difficult to maintain and test. Based on that, a phenomenon called unnecessary structural complexity may occur, in which a program has a cyclomatic complexity value that can be reduced without affecting its external behavior. In a previous work, we developed an approach and tool to address this problem. The approach is able to identify the presence of unnecessary cyclomatic complexity and to show the developer a suggestion to restructure the source code, through a control flow graph. The goal of this paper is to automate the source code refactoring process to support the elimination of unnecessary cyclomatic complexity. We performed two experimental studies to evaluate the approach in the academic context. The evidences provided by these studies suggest that the approach is able to support unnecessary cyclomatic complexity removal. We could not find, however, evidences about the implications of such approach on unit tests development.

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Cited By

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Muzammul MAwais M(2018)An empirical approach for software reengineering process with relation to quality assurance mechanismADCAIJ: Advances in Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence Journal10.14201/ADCAIJ20187331467:3(31-46)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2018
https://doi.org/10.14201/ADCAIJ2018733146

Index Terms

An Automated Refactoring Approach to Remove Unnecessary Complexity in Source Code
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
      1. Software reverse engineering

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Published In

SAST '17: Proceedings of the 2nd Brazilian Symposium on Systematic and Automated Software Testing

September 2017

100 pages

ISBN:9781450353021

DOI:10.1145/3128473

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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SBC: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 September 2017

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SAST '17

SAST '17: 2nd Brazilian Symposium on Systematic and Automated Software Testing

September 18 - 19, 2017

Fortaleza, Brazil

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SAST '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 11 of 16 submissions, 69%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 45 of 92 submissions, 49%

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Muzammul MAwais M(2018)An empirical approach for software reengineering process with relation to quality assurance mechanismADCAIJ: Advances in Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence Journal10.14201/ADCAIJ20187331467:3(31-46)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2018
https://doi.org/10.14201/ADCAIJ2018733146

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On experimenting refactoring tools to remove code smells

Test code refactoring unveiled: where and how does it affect test code quality and effectiveness?

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