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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…

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…

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…

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…

Background: Understanding maintenance activities performed in a source code repository could help practitioners reduce uncertainty and improve cost-effectiveness by planning ahead and pre-allocating resources towards source code…

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…

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…

Detecting refactorings in commit history is essential to improve the comprehension of code changes in code reviews and to provide valuable information for empirical studies on software evolution. Several techniques have been proposed to…

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…

Refactoring is a well-known technique that is widely adopted by software engineers to improve the design and enable the evolution of a system. Knowing which refactoring operations were applied in a code change is a valuable information to…

Software Quality is a major concern in software engineering development in order to be competitive. Such a quality can be achieved by a possible technique called Refactoring where the systems external behavior of the system is not changed.…

Detecting semantic interference remains a challenge in collaborative software development. Recent lightweight static analysis techniques improve efficiency over SDG-based methods, but they still suffer from a high rate of false positives. A…

To create unit tests, it may be necessary to refactor the production code, e.g. by widening access to specific methods or by decomposing classes into smaller units that are easier to test independently. We report on an extensive study to…

In this paper, we present a tertiary systematic literature review of previous surveys, secondary systematic literature reviews, and systematic mappings. We identify the main observations (what we know) and challenges (what we do not know)…

Many software metrics are designed to measure aspects that are believed to be related to software quality. Static software metrics, e.g., size, complexity and coupling are used in defect prediction research as well as software quality…

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 enhances software quality without altering its functional behaviors. Understanding the refactoring activities of developers is crucial to improving software maintainability. With the increasing use of machine learning (ML)…

Refactoring is the practice of improving software quality without altering its external behavior. Developers intuitively refactor their code for multiple purposes, such as improving program comprehension, reducing code complexity, dealing…

Just-in-time defect prediction (JIT-DP) aims to predict the likelihood of code changes resulting in software defects at an early stage. Although code change metrics and semantic features have enhanced prediction accuracy, prior research has…

Context: Refactoring is the art of modifying the design of a system without altering its behavior. The idea is to reorganize variables, classes and methods to facilitate their future adaptations and comprehension. As the concept of behavior…