Related papers: How Developers Extract Functions: An Experiment
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…
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…
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…
Developers often refactor code to improve the maintainability and comprehension of the software. There are many studies on refactoring activities in traditional software systems. However, refactoring in data-intensive systems is not well…
Refactoring is a common practice in software development, aimed at improving the internal code structure in order to make it easier to understand and modify. Consequently, it is often assumed that refactoring makes the code less prone to…
Complex software can be hard to read, adapt, and maintain. Refactoring it can create cleaner and self-explanatory code. Refactoring tools try to guide developers towards better code, with more quality. However, most of them take too long to…
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…
The names of variables and functions serve as implicit documentation and are instrumental for program comprehension. But choosing good meaningful names is hard. We perform a sequence of experiments in which a total of 334 subjects are…
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…
Naming is very important in software development, as names are often the only vehicle of meaning about what the code is intended to do. A recent study on how developers choose names collected the names given by different developers for the…
Context. Source code refactoring is a well-established approach to improving source code quality without compromising its external behavior. Motivation. The literature described the benefits of refactoring, yet its application in practice…
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…
Software refactoring plays an important role in software engineering. Developers often turn to refactoring when they want to restructure software to improve its quality without changing its external behavior. Studies show that small-scale…
Decision-making is a key software engineering skill. Developers constantly make choices throughout the software development process, from requirements to implementation. While prior work has studied developer decision-making, the choices…
Background. Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance and is generally performed to enforce the best design and implementation practices or to cope with design defects. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities…
Programmers often use an iterative process of hypothesis generation ("perhaps this function is called twice?") and hypothesis testing ("let's count how many times this breakpoint fires") to understand the behavior of unfamiliar or…
Software refactoring aims at improving code quality while preserving the system's external behavior. Although in principle refactoring is a behavior-preserving activity, a study presented by Bavota et al. in 2012 reported the proneness of…
This paper reports an empirical study on refactoring activity in three Java software systems. We investigated some questions on refactoring activity, to confirm or disagree on conclusions that have been drawn from previous empirical…
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…
Large language model (LLM) coding agents can generate working code, but their solutions often accumulate complexity, duplication, and architectural debt. Human developers address such issues through refactoring: behavior-preserving program…