Related papers: How Developers Extract Functions: An Experiment

The sound identification of refactoring opportunities is still an open problem in software engineering. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness of machine learning models in recommending methods that should undergo different refactoring…

While functional programming is an efficient way to express complex software, functional programming languages have a steep learning curve. Haskell can be challenging to learn for students who were only introduced to imperative programming.…

Segmentation, a new approach based on successive edge contraction is introduced for extract method refactoring. It targets identification of distinct functionalities implemented within a method. Segmentation builds upon data and control…

Maintainable and general software allows developers to build robust applications efficiently, yet achieving these qualities often requires refactoring specialized solutions into reusable components. This challenge becomes particularly…

As programmers write code, they often edit and retry multiple times, creating rich "interaction traces" that reveal how they approach coding tasks and provide clues about their level of skill development. For novice programmers in…

We aim to explore how developers document their refactoring activities during the software life cycle. We call such activity Self-Affirmed Refactoring (SAR), which indicates developers' documentation of their refactoring activities. SAR is…

Commit messages are the atomic level of software documentation. They provide a natural language description of the code change and its purpose. Messages are critical for software maintenance and program comprehension. Unlike documenting…

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…

Human decision-makers often receive assistance from data-driven algorithmic systems that provide a score for evaluating objects, including individuals. The scores are generated by a function (mechanism) that takes a set of features as input…

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…

Modern code review is a common and essential practice employed in both industrial and open-source projects to improve software quality, share knowledge, and ensure conformance with coding standards. During code review, developers may…

Context: Modern code review is a widely employed technique in both industrial and open-source projects, serving to enhance software quality, share knowledge, and ensure compliance with coding standards and guidelines. While code review is…

Having similar code fragments, also called clones, in software systems can lead to unnecessary comprehension, review and change efforts. Syntactically similar clones can often be encountered in practice. The same is not clear for only…

Scientists across disciplines write code for critical activities like data collection and generation, statistical modeling, and visualization. As large language models that can generate code have become widely available, scientists may…

Researchers have developed numerous debugging approaches to help programmers in the debugging process, but these approaches are rarely used in practice. In this paper, we investigate how programmers debug their code and what researchers…

Refactoring is the process of improving the design of existing code by changing its internal structure without affecting its external behaviour, with the main aims of improving the quality of software product. Therefore, there is a belief…

Software developers solve a diverse and wide range of problems. While software engineering research often focuses on tools to support this problem solving, the strategies that developers use to solve problems are at least as important. In…

Enterprise level software is implemented using multi-layer architecture. These layers are often implemented using de-coupled solutions with millions of lines of code. Programmers often have to track and debug a function call from user…

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…

Engineering software systems is a multidisciplinary activity, whereby a number of artifacts must be created - and maintained - synchronously. In this paper we investigate whether production code and the accompanying tests co-evolve by…