A case study on the effects and limitations of refactoring

We present design issues and empirical observations on extending an industrial development environment with a new refactoring tool for Feature Envy code smells. Refactoring is generally considered to improve code quality, however, it seems from multiple studies that such tools may introduce new bugs and are rarely used by the developers. We tried to discover through a case study why they are not used more often and how they could be made more useful in large scale development.We implemented a refactoring feature executing Move Method refactoring on TTCN-3 projects and performed a survey with industrial experts working in large scale software development projects.In our empirical research we found that the refactoring method preferred grants more control to the users. By doing so, additional factors can be considered while refactoring besides metrics, such as human factors and company policies.