On the Adoption and Effects of Source Code Reuse on Defect Proneness and Maintenance Effort

TL;DR

This study investigates how inheritance and delegation are used in Java projects and analyzes their impact on defect proneness and maintenance effort to better understand their role in software evolution.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into the actual usage of reuse mechanisms and their effects on software quality and maintenance during evolution.

Findings

Inheritance and delegation usage varies over time.

Mechanisms influence defect proneness.

Mechanisms affect maintenance effort.

Abstract

Context. Software reusability mechanisms, like inheritance and delegation in Object-Oriented programming, are widely recognized as key instruments of software design. These are used to reduce the risks of source code being affected by defects, other than to reduce the effort required to maintain and evolve source code. Previous work has traditionally employed source code reuse metrics for prediction purposes, e.g., in the context of defect prediction. Objective. However, our research identifies two noticeable limitations of current literature. First, still little is known on the extent to which developers actually employ code reuse mechanisms over time. Second, it is still unclear how these mechanisms may contribute to explain defect-proneness and maintenance effort during software evolution. We aim at bridging this gap of knowledge, as an improved understanding of these aspects might provide insights into the actual support provided by these mechanisms, e.g., by suggesting whether and how to use them for prediction purposes. Method. We propose an exploratory study aiming at (1) assessing how developers use inheritance and delegation during software evolution; and (2) statistically analyze the impact of inheritance and delegation on fault proneness and maintenance effort. The study will be conducted on the commits of 17 Java projects of the DEFECTS4J dataset.