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Tue 10 Nov 2020 17:07 - 17:08 at Virtual room 2 - Empirical

Software refactoring aims at improving code quality while preserving the system's external behavior. Although in principle refactoring is a behavior-preserving activity, a study presented by Bavota etal in 2012 reported the proneness of some refactoring actions (eg pull up method) to induce faults. The study was performed by mining refactoring activities and bugs from three systems. Taking profit of the advances made in the mining software repositories field (eg better tools to detect refactoring actions at commit-level granularity), we present a differentiated replication of the work by Bavota etal in which we (i) overcome some of the weaknesses that affect their experimental design, (ii) answer the same research questions of the original study on a much larger dataset (3 vs 103 systems), and (iii) complement the quantitative analysis of the relationship between refactoring and bugs with a qualitative, manual inspection of commits aimed at verifying the extent to which refactoring actions trigger bug-fixing activities. The results of our quantitative analysis confirm the findings of the replicated study, while the qualitative analysis partially demystifies the role played by refactoring actions in the bug introduction.

Tue 10 Nov

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17:00 - 17:30
17:00
2m
Talk
An Empirical Analysis of the Costs of Clone- and Platform-Oriented Software Reuse
Research Papers
Jacob Krüger University of Magdeburg, Germany, Thorsten Berger Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden / University of Gothenburg, Sweden
DOI
17:03
1m
Talk
Community Expectations for Research Artifacts and Evaluation ProcessesACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
Research Papers
Ben Hermann Technical University Dortmund, Stefan Winter TU Darmstadt, Janet Siegmund TU Chemnitz, Germany
DOI Pre-print Media Attached
17:05
1m
Talk
On the Relationship between Design Discussions and Design Quality: A Case Study of Apache Projects
Research Papers
Umme Ayda Mannan Oregon State University, USA, Iftekhar Ahmed University of California at Irvine, USA, Carlos Jensen Oregon State University, USA, Anita Sarma Oregon State University, USA
DOI
17:07
1m
Talk
On the Relationship between Refactoring Actions and Bugs: A Differentiated Replication
Research Papers
Massimiliano Di Penta University of Sannio, Italy, Gabriele Bavota USI Lugano, Switzerland, Fiorella Zampetti University of Sannio, Italy
DOI
17:09
1m
Talk
The 'as Code' Activities: Development Anti-patterns for Infrastructure as Code
Journal First
Akond Rahman Tennessee Tech University, Effat Farhana NC State University, Laurie Williams North Carolina State University
Link to publication DOI Pre-print Media Attached
17:11
1m
Talk
Thinking Aloud about Confusing Code: A Qualitative Investigation of Program Comprehension and Atoms of Confusion
Research Papers
Dan Gopstein New York University, USA, Anne-Laure Fayard New York University, USA, Sven Apel Saarland University, Germany, Justin Cappos New York University, USA
DOI Pre-print
17:13
17m
Talk
Conversations on Empirical 1
Paper Presentations
Akond Rahman Tennessee Tech University, Ben Hermann Technical University Dortmund, Iftekhar Ahmed University of California at Irvine, USA, Jacob Krüger University of Magdeburg, Germany, Massimiliano Di Penta University of Sannio, Italy, M: Brittany Johnson George Mason University