@conference {SNH15,
	title = {Do Automatic Refactorings Improve Maintainability? An Industrial Case Study},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2015)},
	year = {2015},
	pages = {429{\textendash}438},
	publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
	organization = {IEEE Computer Society},
	address = {Bremen, Germany},
	abstract = {Refactoring is often treated as the main remedy against the unavoidable code erosion happening during software evolution. Studies show that refactoring is indeed an elemental part of the developers{\textquoteright} arsenal. However, empirical studies about the impact of refactorings on software maintainability still did not reach a consensus. Moreover, most of these empirical investigations are carried out on open-source projects where distinguishing refactoring operations from other development activities is a challenge in itself. We had a chance to work together with several software development companies in a project where they got extra budget to improve their source code by performing refactoring operations. Taking advantage of this controlled environment, we collected a large amount of data during a refactoring phase where the developers used a (semi)automatic refactoring tool. By measuring the maintainability of the involved subject systems before and after the refactorings, we got valuable insights into the effect of these refactorings on large-scale industrial projects. All but one company, who applied a special refactoring strategy, achieved a maintainability improvement at the end of the refactoring phase, but even that one company suffered from the negative impact of only one type of refactoring.},
	keywords = {automatic refactoring, coding issues, ISO/IEC 25010, Software maintainability},
	doi = {10.1109/ICSM.2015.7332494},
	url = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7332494/},
	author = {Sz{\H o}ke, G{\'a}bor and Csaba Nagy and P Heged{\H u}s and Rudolf Ferenc and Tibor Gyim{\'o}thy}
}
