Document Type

Poster

Publication Date

4-29-2021

Abstract

Software refactoring is the process of making code changes to a program to improve its structure, design, and implementation, in such a way that it does not change the original program behavior. One example is the “rename” refactoring that changes program elements to new names that are easier to understand. Many software development tools, including Eclipse, offer various built-in refactorings such as rename, move, extract, etc. However, we discovered that over four thousand bugs related to Eclipse refactorings were reported as of January 2021. Many of these bugs get fixed after they are reported on the Eclipse bug report website (called Bugzilla), but others remain unfixed or even forgotten. This raises interesting questions – What percentage of refactoring bugs cannot be fixed or will not be fixed? How long does it take for a bug to get fixed on average? etc. Our analysis of the reported refactoring bugs showed that 20% of the bugs would not be fixed. We also found that on average, an Eclipse refactoring bug takes 223 days to be fixed. To the best of our knowledge, our research work is the first statistical analysis of the Eclipse refactoring bug reports in Bugzilla.

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