Current software remodularisation tools only operate on abstractions of a software system. In this paper, we inves- tigate the actual impact of automated remodularisation on source code using a tool that automatically applies remodularisations as refactorings. This shows us that a typical remodularisation (as computed by the Bunch tool) will require changes to thousands of lines of code, spread throughout the system (typically no code files remain untouched). In a typical multi-developer project this presents a serious integration challenge, and could contribute to the low uptake of such tools in an industrial context. We relate these findings with our ongoing ... [more] research into techniques that produce iterative commit friendly code changes to address this problem.

DOI

Bibtex Entry

@inproceedings{Hall2014,
  author    = "Hall, Mathew and Khojaye, Muhammad and Walkinshaw, Neil and McMinn, Phil",
  title     = "Establishing the Source Code Disruption Caused by Automated Remodularisation Tools",
  booktitle = "International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2014)",
  pages     = "466--470",
  year      = "2014",
  publisher = "IEEE Computer Society"
}