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Related papers: An Empirical Study on Refactoring Activity

200 papers

Software testing process consists of activities that implemented after it is planned and including to document related testing activities. Test processes must be applied necessarily for able to clearly see the quality of software, the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-03-05 M. Hanefi CALP , Utku KOSE

Code smells are symptoms of poor design quality. Since code review is a process that also aims at improving code quality, we investigate whether and how code review influences the severity of code smells. In this study, we analyze more than…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-12-24 Luca Pascarella , Davide Spadini , Fabio Palomba , Alberto Bacchelli

Complex software can be hard to read, adapt, and maintain. Refactoring it can create cleaner and self-explanatory code. Refactoring tools try to guide developers towards better code, with more quality. However, most of them take too long to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Sara Fernandes , Ademar Aguiar , André Restivo

Context: Securing microservice-based applications is crucial, as many IT companies are delivering their businesses through microservices. If security smells affect microservice-based applications, they can possibly suffer from security…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-04-28 Francisco Ponce , Jacopo Soldani , Hernán Astudillo , Antonio Brogi

Context: Refactoring is recognized as an effective practice to maintain evolving software systems. For software libraries, we study how library developers refactor their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), especially when it impacts…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-10-02 Raula Gaikovina Kula , Ali Ouni , Daniel M. German , Katsuro Inoue

Creating functions is at the center of writing computer programs. But there has been little empirical research on how this is done and what are the considerations that developers use. We design an experiment in which we can compare the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-09-05 Alexey Braver , Dror G. Feitelson

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for automated code refactoring tasks. Although these models can quickly refactor code, the quality may exhibit inconsistencies and unpredictable behavior. In this article, we systematically…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Norman Peitek , Julia Hess , Sven Apel

Context. Source code refactoring is a well-established approach to improving source code quality without compromising its external behavior. Motivation. The literature described the benefits of refactoring, yet its application in practice…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Mikel Robredo , Matteo Esposito , Fabio Palomba , Rafael Peñaloza , Valentina Lenarduzzi

Developers often extract methods to improve readability, understanding, and reuse, while inlining keeps logic in one block. Prior work based on static metrics has not shown clear differences between these practices, and the human side of…

Commits often involve refactorings -- behavior-preserving code modifications aiming at software design improvements. Refactoring operations pose a challenge to code reviewers, as distinguishing them from behavior-altering changes is often…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Benjamin Ritz , Aleksandar Karakaš , Denis Helic

To meet project timelines or budget constraints, developers intentionally deviate from writing optimal code to feasible code in what is known as incurring Technical Debt (TD). Furthermore, as part of planning their correction, developers…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-14 Anthony Peruma , Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Christian D. Newman , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Ali Ouni

The concept of Self-Affirmed Refactoring (SAR) was introduced to explore how developers document their refactoring activities in commit messages, i.e., developers' explicit documentation of refactoring operations intentionally introduced…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-09-22 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Ali Ouni

Object-oriented code smells are well-known concepts in software engineering that refer to bad design and development practices commonly observed in software systems. With the emergence of mobile apps, new classes of code smells have been…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-10-15 Sarra Habchi , Naouel Moha , Romain Rouvoy

Background: Noise, defined as an unwanted sound, is one of the commonest factors that could affect people's performance in their daily work activities. The software engineering research community has marginally investigated the effects of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-07-12 Simone Romano , Giuseppe Scanniello , Davide Fucci , Natalia Juristo , Burak Turhan

Software design smells are design attributes which violate the fundamental design principles. Design smells are a key cause of design debt. Although the activities of design smell identification and measurement are predominantly considered…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-10-15 Asif Imran , Tevfik Kosar

Recent advances in coding agents have shown remarkable progress in software issue resolution. In practice, real-world issues are typically bug fixes or feature requests in which human developers naturally incorporate refactoring as part of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Zhao Tian , Zifan Zhang , Tao Xiao , Dong Wang , Masanari Kondo , Junjie Chen , Yasutaka Kamei

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is being increasingly used to learn and adapt application behavior in many domains, including large-scale and safety critical systems, as for example, autonomous driving. With the advent of plug-n-play RL…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-08-04 Nicolás Cardozo , Ivana Dusparic , Christian Cabrera

In collaborative software development, multiple contributors frequently change the source code in parallel to implement new features, fix bugs, refactor existing code, and make other changes. These simultaneous changes need to be merged…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Andre Oliveira , Vania Neves , Alexandre Plastino , Ana Carla Bibiano , Alessandro Garcia , Leonardo Murta

Code refactoring is widely recognized as an essential software engineering practice to improve the understandability and maintainability of the source code. The Extract Method refactoring is considered as "Swiss army knife" of refactorings,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-12-21 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Ali Ouni

Cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) have gained popularity due to their low cost and elasticity. However, like other software, SaaS applications suffer from code smells, which can drastically affect functionality and resource usage.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-08-17 Asif Imran , Tevfik Kosar