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Related papers: How Do I Refactor This? An Empirical Study on Refa…

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Software engineering is knowledge-intensive and requires software developers to continually search for knowledge, often on community question answering platforms such as Stack Overflow. Such information sharing platforms do not exist in…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-03-17 Sebastian Baltes , Christoph Treude , Martin P. Robillard

Question-and-answer platforms such as Stack Overflow are an important way for software developers to share and retrieve knowledge. However, reusing poorly understood code can lead to serious problems, such as bugs or security…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Kathrin Figl , Maria Kirchner , Sebastian Baltes , Michael Felderer

This report investigates the relationship between software refactoring and behavior preservation. Existing behavior preservation analyses often lack comprehensive insights into refactoring rejections and do not provide actionable solutions.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Wouter Brinksma , William Wernsen , Evert Verduin , Herman Hilberink , Patrick de Beer , Lex Bijlsma , Harrie Passier

As one of the most well-known programmer Q&A websites, Stack Overflow (i.e., SO) is serving tens of thousands of developers every day. Previous work has shown that many developers reuse the code snippets on SO when they find an answer (from…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-04-28 Yuan Huang , Furen Xu , Haojie Zhou , Xiangping Chen , Xiaocong Zhou , Tong Wang

Context: Software refactoring aims to improve software quality and developer productivity. Numerous empirical studies investigating the impact of refactoring activities on software quality have been conducted over the last two decades.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-08-19 Satnam Kaur , Paramvir Singh

Enterprise applications are often built as service-oriented architectures, where the individual services are designed to perform specific functions and interact with each other by means of well-defined APIs (Application Programming…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Fabrizio Montesi , Marco Peressotti , Valentino Picotti , Olaf Zimmermann

To refactor already working code while keeping reliability, compatibility and perhaps security, we can borrow ideas from micropass/nanopass compilers. By treating the procedure of software refactoring as composing code transformations, and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Yu Liu

Refactoring is a crucial technique for improving the efficiency and maintainability of software by restructuring its internal design while preserving its external behavior. While classical programs have benefited from various refactoring…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Jianjun Zhao

Programming problems can be solved in a multitude of functionally correct ways, but the quality of these solutions (e.g. readability, maintainability) can vary immensely. When code quality is poor, symptoms emerge in the form of 'code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-11 Ivan Tan , Christopher M. Poskitt

Explanations are essential in software engineering (SE) and requirements communication, helping stakeholders clarify ambiguities, justify design choices, and build shared understanding. Online Q&A forums such as Stack Overflow provide…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Martin Obaidi , Kushtrim Qengaj , Hannah Deters , Jakob Droste , Marc Herrmann , Kurt Schneider , Jil Klünder

Context: Code refactoring is widely recognized as an essential software engineering practice that improves the understandability and maintainability of source code. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities through mining…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Eman Abdullah AlOmar

An important goal for programmers is to minimize cost of identifying and correcting defects in source code. Code review is commonly used for identifying programming defects. However, manual code review has some shortcomings: a) it is time…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-09-13 Balwinder Sodhi , Shipra Sharma

Stack Overflow has been heavily used by software developers to seek programming-related information. More and more developers use Community Question and Answer forums, such as Stack Overflow, to search for code examples of how to accomplish…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-10-31 Zhipeng Gao , Xin Xia , David Lo , John Grundy , Xindong Zhang , Zhenchang Xing

Docker, the industry standard for packaging and deploying applications, leverages Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles to facilitate the creation of images through Dockerfiles. However, maintaining Dockerfiles presents significant…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Emna Ksontini , Meriem Mastouri , Rania Khalsi , Wael Kessentini

Programming question and answer (Q & A) websites, such as Quora, Stack Overflow, and Yahoo! Answer etc. helps us to understand the programming concepts easily and quickly in a way that has been tested and applied by many software…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2015-08-17 Ranjitha R. K. , Sanjay Singh

Large language models (LLMs) for code editing have achieved remarkable progress, yet recent empirical studies reveal a fundamental disconnect between technical accuracy and developer productivity. Despite their strong benchmark performance,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Chenyan Liu , Yun Lin , Jiaxin Chang , Jiawei Liu , Binhang Qi , Bo Jiang , Zhiyong Huang , Jin Song Dong

Refactoring is a practice widely adopted during software maintenance and evolution. Due to its importance, there is extensive work on the effectiveness of refactoring in achieving code quality. However, developer's intentions are usually…

Intelligent services are becoming increasingly more pervasive; application developers want to leverage the latest advances in areas such as computer vision to provide new services and products to users, and large technology firms enable…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-01-29 Alex Cummaudo , Rajesh Vasa , Scott Barnett , John Grundy , Mohamed Abdelrazek

Refactoring is a change made to the internal structure of software to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify without changing its observable behaviour. A database refactoring is a small change to the database schema which…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2010-09-09 Patrick O'Beirne

In this paper an analysis of a technical support data with the goal of identifying process improvement actions for reducing interrupts is presented. A technical support chat is established and used to provide internal developer support to…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2015-10-19 Zádor Dániel Kelemen , Balázs Tódor , Sándor Hodosi , Ákos Somfai