Games for Training Software Refactoring
Over time software systems can become increasingly complex due to ongoing changes and extensions, which often makes them difficult to maintain. In particular, issues (such as bad smells) in source code or software design and architecture can negatively impact a system’s maintainability and extensibility, which can lead to a massive cost increase of software projects (by accumulating a system’s technical debt). According to several studies, software maintenance and evolution often account for 80% or more than 90% of total software-project costs. A way commonly considered useful for repaying technical debt is software refactoring. It aims to improve the internal software quality by restructuring the system's source code while preserving the observable software behavior. However, due to several barriers such as the perceived difficulties and risks, software refactoring is often neglected in practice.
This website presents training environments and other content for refactoring. These (game-based) tools and techniques aim at assisting developers in the refactoring process and in acquiring refactoring-related skills. The content provided here includes results from academic research, mostly performed in the framework of a PhD project at the Institute for Information Systems at WU Vienna, and is subject to ongoing improvement and extension.
In the following, the designed and developed training environments, analysis tools, models and frameworks, as well as related scientific publications are presented.
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Copyright Terms: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.
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