Are refactorings less error-prone than other changes?

TitleAre refactorings less error-prone than other changes?
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2006
AuthorsWeißgerber, P, Diehl, S
Secondary TitleProceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories
Pagination112–118
PublisherACM
Place PublishedNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number1-59593-397-2
Keywordsargouml, bug reports, bugs, change history, jedit, junit, re-engineering, refactoring, reverse engineering, software evolution, version control
Abstract

Refactorings are program transformations which should preserve the program behavior. Consequently, we expect that during phases when there are mostly refactorings in the change history of a system, only few new bugs are introduced. For our case study we analyzed the version histories of several open source systems and reconstructed the refactorings performed. Furthermore, we obtained bug reports from various sources depending on the system. Based on this data we identify phases when the above hypothesis holds and those when it doesn't.

URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1137983.1138011
DOI10.1145/1137983.1138011
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