Related papers: RefactorInsight: Enhancing IDE Representation of C…

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…

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 the process of changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behavior of the code yet improves its internal structure. Not only researchers, but also practitioners, need to know about past…

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…

Refactoring is a maintenance activity that aims to improve design quality while preserving the behavior of a system. Several (semi)automated approaches have been proposed to support developers in this maintenance activity, based on the…

We present the Code Documentation and Analysis Tool (CoDAT). CoDAT is a tool designed to maintain consistency between the various levels of code documentation, e.g. if a line in a code sketch is changed, the comment that documents the…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for automated code refactoring tasks. Although these models can quickly refactor code, the quality may exhibit inconsistencies and unpredictable behavior. In this article, we systematically…

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…

Code analyzers such as Error Prone and FindBugs detect code patterns symptomatic of bugs, performance issues, or bad style. These tools express patterns as quick fixes that detect and rewrite unwanted code. However, it is difficult to come…

In modern software engineering, build systems play the crucial role of facilitating the conversion of source code into software artifacts. Recent research has explored high-level causes of build failures, but has largely overlooked the…

It is necessary to gather real refactoring instances while conducting empirical studies on refactoring. However, existing refactoring detection approaches are insufficient in terms of their accuracy and coverage. Reducing the manual effort…

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…

Popular modern code review tools (e.g. Gerrit and GitHub) sort files in a code review in alphabetical order. A prior study (on open-source projects) shows that the changed files' positions in the code review affect the review process. Their…

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…

Refactoring tools in popular Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) can introduce unintended behavioral changes or compilation errors, a persistent challenge that undermines developer trust in automated transformations. Traditional…

Context : Software comprehension and maintenance activities, such as refactoring, are said to be negatively impacted by software complexity. The methods used to measure software product and processes complexity have been thoroughly debated…

Many code changes that developers make in their projects are repeated and constitute recurrent change patterns. It is of interest to collect such patterns from the version history of open-source repositories and suggest the most useful of…

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…

A source code difference (diff) indicates changes made by comparing new and old source codes, and it can be utilized in code reviews to help developers understand the changes made to the code. Although many diff generation methods have been…