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Related papers: An Empirical Study on Refactoring-Inducing Pull Re…

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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

Autonomous coding agents are generating code at an unprecedented scale, with OpenAI Codex alone creating over 400,000 pull requests (PRs) in two months. As agentic PR volumes increase, code review agents (CRAs) have become routine…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Kowshik Chowdhury , Dipayan Banik , K M Ferdous , Shazibul Islam Shamim

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

GitHub's Copilot for Pull Requests (PRs) is a promising service aiming to automate various developer tasks related to PRs, such as generating summaries of changes or providing complete walkthroughs with links to the relevant code. As this…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Tao Xiao , Hideaki Hata , Christoph Treude , Kenichi Matsumoto

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

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

Refactoring is one of the most important activities in software engineering which is used to improve the quality of a software system. With the advancement of deep learning techniques, researchers are attempting to apply deep learning…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Bridget Nyirongo , Yanjie Jiang , He Jiang , Hui Liu

Context: Pull-based development model is widely used in open source, leading the trends in distributed software development. One aspect which has garnered significant attention is studies on pull request decision - identifying factors for…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-05-31 Xunhui Zhang , Yue Yu , Georgios Gousios , Ayushi Rastogi

As AI agents increasingly contribute to code development and maintenance, there is still limited empirical evidence on the quality and risk characteristics of their changes in real-world projects, particularly for refactoring-oriented…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Mohamed Almukhtar , Anwar Ghammam , Hua Ming

AI coding agents are increasingly acting as autonomous contributors by generating and submitting pull requests (PRs). However, we lack empirical evidence on how these agent-generated PRs differ from human contributions, particularly in how…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Daniel Ogenrwot , John Businge

Pull Requests (PRs) are central to collaborative coding, summarizing code changes for reviewers. However, many PR descriptions are incomplete, uninformative, or have out-of-context content, compromising developer workflows and hindering…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Kutay Tire , Berk Çakar , Eray Tüzün

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

Refactoring is the process of improving the design of existing code by changing its internal structure without affecting its external behaviour, with the main aims of improving the quality of software product. Therefore, there is a belief…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2015-02-13 S. H. Kannangara , W. M. J. I. Wijayanayake

Modern Code Review (MCR) plays a key role in software quality practices. In MCR process, a new patch (i.e., a set of code changes) is encouraged to be examined by reviewers in order to identify weaknesses in source code prior to an…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-06-28 Shade Ruangwan , Patanamon Thongtanunam , Akinori Ihara , Kenichi Matsumoto

Code review is a key development practice that contributes to improve software quality and to foster knowledge sharing among developers. However, code review usually takes time and demands detailed and time-consuming analysis of textual…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Rodrigo Brito , Marco Tulio Valente

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

Nowadays, software testing professionals are commonly required to develop coding skills to work on test automation. One essential skill required from those who code is the ability to implement code refactoring, a valued quality aspect of…

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…

Commit messages are the atomic level of software documentation. They provide a natural language description of the code change and its purpose. Messages are critical for software maintenance and program comprehension. Unlike documenting…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Jiaqian Liu , Kenneth Addo , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Christian Newman , Ali Ouni , Zhe Yu

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