Refactoring Recommendations Based on the Optimization of Socio-Technical Congruence

Published in Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), Virtual, 2020, 3 pages, 2020

Abstract

Software development is known to be a social activity that involves developers, project managers, and stakeholders. Recent studies have proved a direct relation between social and technical aspects, e.g., poor coordination among developers may lead to an increase of technical debt in source code. The so-called socio-technical congruence measures the level of coordination existing in an organization at their different levels. In this late-breaking idea paper, we propose a novel way to employ the socio-technical congruence in the context of source code quality improvement: we design a community-based refactoring recommendation approach that aims at optimizing socio-technical congruence while keeping into account the source code dependencies among the components of a software project. A search-based algorithm is employed to this purpose and we envision the novel approach to be suitable for providing Extract Class and Extract Package refactoring recommendations.

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Recommended citation: M. D. Stefano, F. Pecorelli, D. A. Tamburri, F. Palomba and A. D. Lucia, “Refactoring Recommendations Based on the Optimization of Socio-Technical Congruence,” 2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), Adelaide, SA, Australia, 2020, pp. 794-796, doi: 10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00094.