Study: Refactoring Doesn't Improve Code Quality

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday March 3, 2015 @11:38AM from the just-makes-you-hate-it-a-bit-less dept.

itwbennett writes: A team of researchers in Sri Lanka set out to test whether common refactoring techniques resulted in measurable improvements in software quality, both externally (e.g., Is the code more maintainable?) and internally (e.g., Number of lines of code). Here's the short version of their findings: Refactoring doesn't make code easier to analyze or change (PDF); it doesn't make code run faster; and it doesn't result in lower resource utilization. But it may make code more maintainable.

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Procedural to Object Code by xfade551 · 2015-03-03 12:00 · Score: 4, Informative

The test case basically converted procedural/structural code (structs and test cases) to object oriented code (classes and polymorphism) for a small, 4,500 line project. What they basically added was extensibility at the expense of overhead and traded individual-line complexity with architectural complexity.