A quantitative approach for evaluating the effectiveness of refactoring in software development process

Software development is a mentally complicated task. Different software development methodologies and quality assurance methods are used in order to attain high quality, reliable, and bug free software. Extreme programming (XP) is a software development discipline in the family of agile methodologies that contributes towards quality improvement using dozen practices. One of the important practices in XP is refactoring. Refactoring which can be defined as ¿a change made to the internal structure of software to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify without changing its observable behavior¿. Although there has been a large amount of research investigations for this concept, but there has been little work done in quantitative approach. The main objective of the research is to develop a software development model using refactoring practices. The software development model proposed in such a way that refactoring activity accompanies all the phases of software development. This work also shows the evaluation of effectiveness of the proposed software development model.