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Refactoring is the art of improving the design of a system without altering its external behavior. Refactoring has become a well established and disciplined software engineering practice that has attracted a significant amount of research…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-26 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Anthony Peruma , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Christian Newman , Ali Ouni , Marouane Kessentini

Refactoring aims at improving code non-functional attributes without modifying its external behavior. Previous studies investigated the motivations behind refactoring by surveying developers. With the aim of generalizing and complementing…

Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of paramount importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are used by most software projects enabling developers, quality assurance, managers, and users to submit…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Anthony Peruma , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Christian D. Newman , Ali Ouni

Developers often refactor code to improve the maintainability and comprehension of the software. There are many studies on refactoring activities in traditional software systems. However, refactoring in data-intensive systems is not well…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Biruk Asmare Muse , Foutse Khomh , Giuliano Antoniol

Despite the availability of refactoring as a feature in popular IDEs, recent studies revealed that developers are reluctant to use them, and still prefer the manual refactoring of their code. At JetBrains, our goal is to fully support…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Yaroslav Golubev , Zarina Kurbatova , Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Timofey Bryksin , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer

Refactoring is widely recognized as one of the efficient techniques to manage technical debt and maintain a healthy software project through enforcing best design practices or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-09-24 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Anthony Peruma , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Christian D. Newman , Ali Ouni

Software development agents such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor Agent, Devin, and OpenAI Codex are being increasingly integrated into developer workflows. While prior work has evaluated agent capabilities for code completion and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Lukas Ottenhof , Daniel Penner , Abram Hindle , Thibaud Lutellier

Software refactoring plays an important role in software engineering. Developers often turn to refactoring when they want to restructure software to improve its quality without changing its external behavior. Studies show that small-scale…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-02-16 James Ivers , Robert L. Nord , Ipek Ozkaya , Chris Seifried , Christopher S. Timperley , Marouane Kessentini

Refactoring is the de-facto practice to optimize software health. While several studies propose refactoring strategies to optimize software design through applying design patterns and removing design defects, little is known about how…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-11-16 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Tianjia Wang , Vaibhavi Raut , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Christian Newman , Ali Ouni

An essential part of software maintenance and evolution, refactoring is performed by developers, regardless of technology or domain, to improve the internal quality of the system, and reduce its technical debt. However, choosing the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Anthony Peruma , Steven Simmons , Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Christian D. Newman , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Ali Ouni

This paper reports an empirical study on refactoring activity in three Java software systems. We investigated some questions on refactoring activity, to confirm or disagree on conclusions that have been drawn from previous empirical…

Refactoring is an essential activity during software evolution. Frequently, practitioners rely on such transformations to improve source code maintainability and quality. As a consequence, this process may produce new source code entities…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-03-11 Aline Brito , Andre Hora , Marco Tulio Valente

Modern code review is a widely used technique employed in both industrial and open-source projects to improve software quality, share knowledge, and ensure adherence to coding standards and guidelines. During code review, developers may…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Moataz Chouchen , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Ali Ouni

Refactoring is a common practice in software development, aimed at improving the internal code structure in order to make it easier to understand and modify. Consequently, it is often assumed that refactoring makes the code less prone to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Isabella Ferreira , Lawrence Arkoh , Anderson Uchôa , Ana Carla Bibiano , Alessandro Garcia , Wesley K. G. Assunção

Context. Refactoring has been widely investigated in the past in relation to production code quality, yet still little is known on how developers apply refactoring on test code. Specifically, there is still a lack of investigation into how…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Luana Martins , Valeria Pontillo , Heitor Costa , Filomena Ferrucci , Fabio Palomba , Ivan Machado

Refactoring is a critical process in software development, aiming at improving the internal structure of code while preserving its external behavior. Refactoring engines are integral components of modern Integrated Development Environments…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Haibo Wang , Zhuolin Xu , Huaien Zhang , Nikolaos Tsantalis , Shin Hwei Tan

With the rapid development of deep learning, the implementation of intricate algorithms and substantial data processing have become standard elements of deep learning projects. As a result, the code has become progressively complex as the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Siqi Wang , Xing Hu , Bei Wang , Wenxin Yao , Xin Xia , Xinyu Wang

Background. Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance and is generally performed to enforce the best design and implementation practices or to cope with design defects. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Ali Ouni , Marouane Kessentini

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

Context: Modern code review is a widely employed technique in both industrial and open-source projects, serving to enhance software quality, share knowledge, and ensure compliance with coding standards and guidelines. While code review is…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Eman Abdullah AlOmar
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