一句话：对Bavota等人2012年重构与缺陷关系研究的差异化复现，在103个系统上确认定量结论并辅以提交级定性分析。
软件重构原则上应保持外部行为，但已有研究发现某些重构操作可能引入缺陷。本文对Bavota等人2012年的研究进行差异化复现：改进其实验设计缺陷，利用提交级重构检测工具，将分析对象从3个系统扩展到103个系统，回答相同研究问题；并补充对提交的人工检查，验证重构操作在多大程度上触发缺陷修复。定量分析确认了原研究关于重构操作与缺陷关联的发现，而定性分析则部分澄清了重构操作在缺陷引入中的因果作用。
Software refactoring aims at improving code quality while preserving the system's external behavior. Although in principle refactoring is a behavior-preserving activity, a study presented by Bavota etal in 2012 reported the proneness of some refactoring actions (eg pull up method) to induce faults. The study was performed by mining refactoring activities and bugs from three systems. Taking profit of the advances made in the mining software repositories field (eg better tools to detect refactoring actions at commit-level granularity), we present a differentiated replication of the work by Bavota etal in which we (i) overcome some of the weaknesses that affect their experimental design, (ii) answer the same research questions of the original study on a much larger dataset (3 vs 103 systems), and (iii) complement the quantitative analysis of the relationship between refactoring and bugs with a qualitative, manual inspection of commits aimed at verifying the extent to which refactoring actions trigger bug-fixing activities. The results of our quantitative analysis confirm the findings of the replicated study, while the qualitative analysis partially demystifies the role played by refactoring actions in the bug introduction.
@inproceedings{paperbot5846,
title = {On the relationship between refactoring actions and bugs: a differentiated replication},
author = {Massimiliano Di Penta and Gabriele Bavota and Fiorella Zampetti},
booktitle = {FSE},
year = {2020},
doi = {10.1145/3368089.3409695}
}