Related papers: Operation-based Refactoring-aware Merging: An Empi…

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…

Maintaining and scaling software systems relies heavily on effective code refactoring, yet this process remains labor-intensive, requiring developers to carefully analyze existing codebases and prevent the introduction of new defects.…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems implicitly assume mutual consistency among retrieved documents -- an assumption that frequently fails in practice. We present ConflictRAG, a conflict-aware RAG framework that detects, classifies,…

Decisions on which classes to refactor are fraught with difficulty. The problem of identifying candidate classes becomes acute when confronted with large systems comprising hundreds or thousands of classes. In this paper, we describe a…

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.…

Developers often refactor source code to improve its quality during software development. A challenge in refactoring is to determine if it can be applied or not. To help with this decision-making process, we aim to search for past…

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a commonly used approach for enhancing large language models (LLMs) with relevant and up-to-date information. However, the retrieved sources can often contain conflicting information and it remains…

Merge conflicts often arise when developers integrate changes from different software branches. The conflicts can result from overlapping edits in programs (i.e., textual conflicts) or cause build and test errors (i.e., build and test…

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…

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…

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…

Unstructured line-based merge tools are widely used in practice. Structured AST-based merge tools show significantly improved merge accuracy, but are rarely used in practice because they are language specific and costly, consequently not…

Developing complex software requires that multiple views and versions of the software can be developed in parallel and merged as supported by views and managed by version control systems. In this context, this paper considers monitoring…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently attracted wide interest for tackling software engineering tasks. In contrast to code generation, refactoring demands precise, semantics-preserving edits that improve program structure, which also…

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…

Code merging is a significant challenge, particularly in large-scale projects. Existing solutions, including program analysis and machine learning, show promise but face critical limitations. Program analysis lacks the ability to infer…

We present Lean Refactor, a plug-and-play retrieval-augmented agentic framework for multi-objective, controllable, and version-robust refactoring of Lean proofs. LLM-generated proofs are notoriously correct-but-verbose and brittle across…

Program merging is standard practice when developers integrate their individual changes to a common code base. When the merge algorithm fails, this is called a merge conflict. The conflict either manifests in textual merge conflicts where…