An empirical study on the effect of the order of applying software refactoring

Abstract

Refactoring has been widely used to improve software design. Refactoring is applied when a bad smell is detected. Several bad smells might be present in the code. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to find if the order of applying refactoring has any impact on the quality of the final code. We run six experiments by applying three refactoring methods in different orders and evaluate the quality of the code using software metrics at the end of each refactoring sequence. Our experiments results show that that applying refactoring in different order provides different impact on the final code.