Related papers: Impact of Change Granularity in Refactoring Detect…

Refactoring is a well-known technique that is widely adopted by software engineers to improve the design and enable the evolution of a system. Knowing which refactoring operations were applied in a code change is a valuable information to…

Code changes are an integral part of the software development process. Many code changes are meant to improve the code without changing its functional behavior, e.g., refactorings and performance improvements. Unfortunately, validating…

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…

An essential part of software maintenance and evolution, refactoring is performed by developers, regardless of technology or domain, to improve the internal quality of the system, and reduce its technical debt. However, choosing the…

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.…

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…

We present a novel approach to detect refactoring opportunities by measuring the participation of references between types in instances of patterns representing design flaws. This technique is validated using an experiment where we analyse…

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…

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…

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…

In this short paper, we explore a new way to refactor a simple but tricky-to-parallelize tree-traversal algorithm to harness multicore parallelism. Crucially, the refactoring draws from some classic techniques from programming-languages…

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…

Source code is changed for a reason, e.g., to adapt, correct, or adapt it. This reason can provide valuable insight into the development process but is rarely explicitly documented when the change is committed to a source code repository.…

Background: Search-based refactoring involves searching for a sequence of refactorings to achieve specific objectives. Although a typical objective is improving code quality, a different perspective is also required; the searched sequence…

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…

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…

For large software systems, refactoring activities can be a challenging task, since for keeping component complexity under control the overall architecture as well as many details of each component have to be considered. Product metrics are…

Refactoring is a critical process in software development, aiming at improving the internal structure of code while preserving its external behavior. Refactoring engines are integral components of modern Integrated Development Environments…

Code smell is a great challenge in software refactoring, which indicates latent design or implementation flaws that may degrade the software maintainability and evolution. Over the past decades, a variety of refactoring approaches have been…

Code refactoring is a fundamental software engineering practice aimed at improving code quality and maintainability. Despite its importance, developers often neglect refactoring due to the significant time, effort, and resources it…