Object-Oriented Code Metric-Based Refactoring Opportunities Identification Approaches: Analysis

This paper presents analysis of existing empirical studies of software metric-based refactorings opportunities identification (ROI) for object-oriented (OO) software systems. We carried out a comprehensive analysis on sixteen (16) primary studies to identify the state-of-the-practice in ROI, focusing on their operations, refactoring activities, programming languages and the impact on software quality. The analysis results show that ROI approaches were designed for either a single refactoring activity or couple of them. Additionally, move method and extract class refactoring were the most refactorings activities performed on OO software systems. Also, OO metrics played an indispensable role in both opportunity detection and refactoring decisions. With the obtained results, we recommend the development of a generic ROI approach that is capable of identifying opportunities for all refactoring activities as well as suggesting the appropriate refactoring operations to apply.