Related papers: One Thousand and One Stories: A Large-Scale Survey…
Refactoring is a widespread practice that helps developers to improve the maintainability and readability of their code. However, there is a limited number of studies empirically investigating the actual motivations behind specific…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Developers often change types of program elements. Such refactoring often involves updating not only the type of the element itself, but also the API of all type-dependent references in the code, thus it is tedious and time-consuming.…
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 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…
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…
Inspection of code changes is a time-consuming task that constitutes a big part of everyday work of software engineers. Existing IDEs provide little information about the semantics of code changes within the file editor view. Therefore…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Agentic coding tools, such as OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor, are transforming the software engineering landscape. These AI-powered systems function as autonomous teammates capable of planning and executing complex development tasks.…
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…
Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance, and is usually performed to enforce better design and coding practices, while coping with design defects. The Extract Method refactoring is widely used for merging duplicate code…
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 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…