Related papers: Industry Experiences with Large-Scale Refactoring
Large language models (LLMs) have gained widespread popularity and have steadily improved over time, enabling software developers to use them for various code-related tasks. One common task is code refactoring, where the LLM suggests…
Context. Code refactoring improves software quality without changing external behavior. Despite its advantages, its benefits are hindered by the considerable cost of time, resources, and continuous effort it demands. Aim. Understanding why…
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) is reshaping software engineering by profoundly influencing coding, documentation, and system maintenance practices. As these tools become deeply embedded in developers' daily workflows,…
Background: Test-driven development (TDD) is a technique that repeats short coding cycles interleaved with testing. The developer first writes a unit test for the desired functionality, followed by the necessary production code, and…
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…
Recent advances in coding agents have shown remarkable progress in software issue resolution. In practice, real-world issues are typically bug fixes or feature requests in which human developers naturally incorporate refactoring as part of…
In this paper, we present a tertiary systematic literature review of previous surveys, secondary systematic literature reviews, and systematic mappings. We identify the main observations (what we know) and challenges (what we do not know)…
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…
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…
Reverse engineering is a complex process essential to software-security tasks such as vulnerability discovery and malware analysis. Significant research and engineering effort has gone into developing tools to support reverse engineers.…
Although software managers are generally good at new project estimation, their experience of scheduling rework tends to be poor. Inconsistent or incorrect effort estimation can increase the risk that the completion time for a project will…
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 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…
Context: Refactoring is recognized as an effective practice to maintain evolving software systems. For software libraries, we study how library developers refactor their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), especially when it impacts…
Background: Multitasking is usual in software development. It is the ability to stop working on a task, switch to another, and return eventually to the first one, as needed or as scheduled. Multitasking, however, comes at a cognitive cost:…
Software refactoring is the process of changing the structure of software without any alteration in its behavior and functionality. Presuming it is carried out in appropriate opportunities, refactoring enhances software quality…
Software product lines have recently been presented as one of the best promising improvements for the efficient software development. Different research works contribute supportive parameters and negotiations regarding the problems of…
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…
The primary value of AI agents in software development lies in their ability to extend the developer's capacity for reasoning and action, not to supplant human involvement. To showcase how to use agents working in tandem with developers, we…
The most important way to achieve higher performance in computer systems is through heterogeneous computing, i.e., by adopting hardware platforms containing more than one type of processor, such as CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs. Several types of…