Are refactorings less error-prone than other changes?

Submitted by msquire on Thu, 2011-04-14 14:32

Title	Are refactorings less error-prone than other changes?
Publication Type	Conference Paper
Year of Publication	2006
Authors	Weißgerber, P, Diehl, S
Secondary Title	Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories
Pagination	112–118
Publisher	ACM
Place Published	New York, NY, USA
ISBN Number	1-59593-397-2
Keywords	argouml, 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.
URL	http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1137983.1138011
DOI	10.1145/1137983.1138011
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