English
Related papers

Related papers: RefDiff: Detecting Refactorings in Version Histori…

200 papers

We present a novel approach to detect refactoring opportunities by measuring the participation of references between types in instances of patterns representing design flaws. This technique is validated using an experiment where we analyse…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2011-03-17 Jens Dietrich , Catherine McCartin , Ewan Tempero , Syed M. Ali Shah

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

Software undergoes constant changes to support new requirements, address bugs, enhance performance, and ensure maintainability. Thus, developers spend a great portion of their workday trying to understand and review the code changes of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-26 Pouria Alikhanifard , Nikolaos Tsantalis

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

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

Technical Debt is a common issue that arises when short-term gains are prioritized over long-term costs, leading to a degradation in the quality of the code. Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a specific type of Technical Debt that…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Shima Esfandiari , Ashkan Sami

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

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

Binary similarity detection is a critical technique that has been applied in many real-world scenarios where source code is not available, e.g., bug search, malware analysis, and code plagiarism detection. Existing works are ineffective in…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-08-04 Zian Liu , Zhi Zhang , Siqi Ma , Dongxi Liu , Jun Zhang , Chao Chen , Shigang Liu , Muhammad Ejaz Ahmed , Yang Xiang

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

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

We aim to explore how developers document their refactoring activities during the software life cycle. We call such activity Self-Affirmed Refactoring (SAR), which indicates developers' documentation of their refactoring activities. SAR is…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Eman Abdullah AlOmar

Modern code review is a common and essential practice employed in both industrial and open-source projects to improve software quality, share knowledge, and ensure conformance with coding standards. During code review, developers may…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-02-11 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Hussein AlRubaye , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Ali Ouni , Marouane Kessentini

Reliable handling of code diffs is central to agents that edit and refactor repositories at scale. We introduce Diff-XYZ, a compact benchmark for code-diff understanding with three supervised tasks: apply (old code $+$ diff $\rightarrow$…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Evgeniy Glukhov , Michele Conti , Egor Bogomolov , Yaroslav Golubev , Alexander Bezzubov

Understanding the changes made by developers when they submit a pull request and/or perform a commit on a repository is a crucial activity in software maintenance and evolution. The common way to review changes relies on examining code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Lei Chen , Michele Lanza , Shinpei Hayashi

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

A crucial activity in software maintenance and evolution is the comprehension of the changes performed by developers, when they submit a pull request and/or perform a commit on the repository. Typically, code changes are represented in the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Lei Chen , Michele Lanza , Shinpei Hayashi

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

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

Data engineering workflows require reliable differencing across files, databases, and query outputs, yet existing tools falter under schema drift, heterogeneous types, and limited explainability. SmartDiff is a unified system that combines…

Databases · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Aryan Poduri , Yashwant Tailor