Effect of Refactoring on Software Quality

Software quality is an important issue in the development of successful software application. Many methods have been applied to improve the software quality. Refactoring is one of those methods. But, the effect of refactoring in general on all the software quality attributes is ambiguous. The goal of this paper is to find out the effect of various refactoring methods on quality attributes and to classify them based on their measurable effect on particular software quality attribute. The paper focuses on studying the Reusability, Complexity, Maintainability, Testability, Adaptability, Understandability, Fault Proneness, Stability and Completeness attribute of a software .This, in turn, will assist the developer in determining that whether to apply a certain refactoring method to improve a desirable quality attribute.