An Investigation of the Relationship between Extract Method and Change Metrics: A Case Study of JEdit

Extract Method is one of the most widely used refactoring patterns. So far, low quality of source code has been regarded as an indicator for Extract Method opportunities. However, recent studies showed that there is no clear relationship between source code quality and Extract Method. Change metrics can be indicators for Extract Method because the characteristics of software evolution strongly affect software quality. However, there has been no study that investigated the relationship between change metrics and Extract Method. In this study, we conducted two studies investigating the relationship between Extract Method and change metrics. As a result, we found that (1) change metrics have a clear relationship with Extract Method and (2) both product and change metrics are necessary to recommend candidates for Extract Method with high accuracy.

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