An Empirical Evaluation of Refactoring

This paper presents a process evaluation for the agile technique of refactoring based on the language C. The basis for this evaluation is made up by an experiment which is targeted on the aspects of increased maintainability and modifiability. Although the maintainability test shows a slight advantage for refactoring, results show no significant strength here. Concerning modifiability, the overhead of applying refactoring appears to even weaken other, positive effects. The analysis of secondary variables provides hints on advantages of the refactoring technique like reduced resource consumption and a reduced occurrence of complicated control structures.