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International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications

ICCSA 2018: Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2018 pp 464–480Cite as

A Hands-on OpenStack Code Refactoring Experience Report

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10964))

Abstract

Nowadays, almost everyone uses some kind of cloud infrastructure. As clouds gaining more and more attention, it is now even more important to have stable and reliable cloud systems. Along with stability and reliability comes source code maintainability. Unfortunately, maintainability has no exact definition, there are several definitions both from users’ and developers’ perspective. In this paper, we analyzed two projects of OpenStack, the world’s leading open-source cloud system, using QualityGate, a static software analyzer which can help to determine the maintainability of software. During the analysis we found quality issues that could be fixed by refactoring the code. We have created 47 patches in this two OpenStack projects. We have also analyzed our patches with QualityGate to see whether they increase the maintainability of the system. We found that a single refactoring has a barely noticeable effect on the maintainability of the software, what is more, it can even decrease maintainability. But if we do refactorings regularly, their cumulative effect will probably increase the quality in the mid and long-term. We also experienced that our refactoring commits were very appreciated by the open-source community.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.sonarqube.org/.

  2. 2.

    Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration system. More details can be found at https://jenkins.io/.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/openstack-infra/jenkins-job-builder.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/openstack/tempest.

  5. 5.

    https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/.

  6. 6.

    https://www.pylint.org/.

  7. 7.

    http://openqa.sed.hu.

  8. 8.

    http://www.inf.u-szeged.hu/~antal/pub/2018-iccsa-openstack-refactoring/.

  9. 9.

    https://github.com/openstack/watcher/commit/a2750c7.

  10. 10.

    https://github.com/openstack/watcher/commit/67455c6.

  11. 11.

    https://github.com/openstack/watcher/commit/f0b58f8.

  12. 12.

    https://review.openstack.org/349582/.

  13. 13.

    https://review.openstack.org/247560.

  14. 14.

    https://review.openstack.org/263343/.

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Acknowledgment

The project has been supported by the UNKP-17-4 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry of Human Capacities, Hungary.

The authors would also like to express their gratitude to Gergely Ladányi and Béla Vancsics for providing technical support in QualityGate analysis and OpenStack contribution as well as to Balázs Gibizer from Ericsson Hungary for his valuable guidance in the OpenStack development.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Software Engineering, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary

    Gábor Antal & Alex Szarka

  2. MTA-SZTE Research Group on Artificial Intelligence, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary

    Péter Hegedűs

Authors
  1. Gábor Antal
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  2. Alex Szarka
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  3. Péter Hegedűs
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Correspondence to Péter Hegedűs .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy

    Osvaldo Gervasi

  2. University of Basilicata, Potenza, Italy

    Beniamino Murgante

  3. Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria

    Sanjay Misra

  4. Saint Petersburg State University, Saint Petersburg, Russia

    Elena Stankova

  5. Polytechnic University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Carmelo M. Torre

  6. University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    Ana Maria A.C. Rocha

  7. Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia

    David Taniar

  8. Kyushu Sangyo University, Fukuoka shi, Fukuoka, Japan

    Bernady O. Apduhan

  9. Politecnico di Bari, Bari, Italy

    Eufemia Tarantino

  10. Myongji University, Yongin, Korea (Republic of)

    Yeonseung Ryu

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Antal, G., Szarka, A., Hegedűs, P. (2018). A Hands-on OpenStack Code Refactoring Experience Report. In: Gervasi, O., et al. Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2018. ICCSA 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10964. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95174-4_37

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95174-4_37

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