Abstract
This paper investigates if Code-Churn, Lines of Code (LoC), Duplicated Code, Complexity and Technical Debt (TD) can inform a coder where to prioritize refactoring. A mature code-base of 1 300 000 LoC in approximately 5000 files for a period of 20 months has been examined. The result is that code-churn is the strongest variable out of the studied variables followed by LoC and TD. Multiplying with code-churn strengthens LoC and TD even more, making them the strongest indicators of refactoring potential.
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Siverland, S., Wernersson, R.C.S., Sennersten, C. (2015). Optimal Refactoring. In: Lassenius, C., Dingsøyr, T., Paasivaara, M. (eds) Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming. XP 2015. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 212. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18612-2_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18612-2_21
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