Description:

Context/Introduction

Build systems are widely used in today’s software projects to automate integration and build processes. Similar to source code, build configuration need to be maintained to avoid outdated configurations, and build breakage as a consequence. Recent work indicates that neglected build maintenance is one of the most frequently occurring reasons why builds break. The context of this topic is situated in finding methods and developing tools that support the developers and release engineers in improving the quality of their build configuration.


Problem Description and Target

Refactoring is a well-known reengineering technique to modify the source code to improve its maintainability while preserving the semantics of the code. It has been shown that refactoring operations can improve code in terms of maintenance. However, the possibility of refactoring build configurations to improve their maintainability has been largely neglected by research. The goal of this topic is to find refactoring operations for build configurations and to empirically show that the operations improve the quality of the build configuration.