Impact of metrics based refactoring on the software quality: A case study

As the software system changes, the design of the software deteriorates hence reducing the quality of the system. This paper presents a case study in which an inventory application is considered and efforts are made to improve the quality of the system by refactoring. The code is an open source application namely "Inventor Deluxe v 1.03", which was first, assessed using the tool Metrics 1.3.6 (an Eclipse Plug-in). The code was then refactored and three more versions were built. At the end of creation of every version the code was assessed to find the improvement in the quality. The results obtained after measuring various metrics helped in tracing the spots in the code, which requires further improvement and hence can be refactored. Most of the refactoring was done manually with little tool support. Finally, a trend was found which shows, that average complexity and size of the code reduces with refactoring - based development, which helps to make the software more maintainable. Thus, although refactoring is time consuming and a labor-intensive work, it has a positive impact on the software quality.