关键词: 技术债, 软件设计, 重构, 开源项目

Abstract:  Software is constantly changing and evolving, driven by the increment of requirements. Software often degrades from the original design, the quality of codes also becomes poor. Developers will meet more barriers and difficulties in the future development when there are some technical debts in the original design. It is necessary to improve the quality of codes by refactorings. This paper introduces some common types of refactorings under the review of related literature, and introduces a simple case to verify the importance of the design-oriented refactorings. This paper aims to answer two questions: (1) whether there are applied refactorings in the open source project and whether there are design-oriented refactorings among them; (2) whether there exists some situation that the structure with a bad design causes difficulties in the fellow-up development and whether the developers apply some refactorings to it later. This paper proves the wide use and importance of refactorings in open source projects, particularly the importance of the design-oriented refactorings.

Key words: technical debt, software design, refactoring, open source project