Assessing the evolution of complex methods: a multi-language study

• Autor(a) principal: Mateus Fellipe Alves Lopes
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/39049
• topic: Code Complexity; Code Smells; Software Maintenance; Software Evolution; Empirical Study; Computação – Teses; Software – Codificação –Teses; Software – Manuteção – Teses; Software – Desenvolvimento – Teses

Over time, software systems tend to increase complexity and become harder to maintain. Despite the drawbacks of code complexity are well-known, complex code is present in most real software projects. Here, an important question arises: why, with all the advice out there against it, do we continue to end up with complex methods? Unfortunately, code complexity is typically assessed for single programming languages (often Java), reducing the generality of findings. Thus, assessing how and why complex code evolves in multiple programming languages is fundamental to better understand the similarities and differences among the languages. In this dissertation, we provide a multi-language empirical study to assess the evolution of complex methods and a survey study to better understand developers’ perceptions. We analyze 1,000 complex methods of 50 popular projects written in JavaScript, Python, Java, C++, and C# and we perform a survey with over 70 developers, including developers from large companies, like Google, Facebook, and Apple. We find that programming language plays an important role in the study of code complexity and that complex methods are not homogeneous in the operations they perform. The developers’ perception of complexity is subjective and varies per programming language. Moreover, developers may deliberately avoid refactoring complex code due to several reasons, including code stability, lack of priority, and refactoring risk. We conclude by discussing insights for researchers and practitioners.