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Related papers: RefSearch: A Search Engine for Refactoring

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Fixing software bugs and adding new features are two of the major maintenance tasks. Software bugs and features are reported as change requests. Developers consult these requests and often choose a few keywords from them as an ad hoc query.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Mohammad Masudur Rahman , Chanchal K. Roy

Code search is a core software engineering task. Effective code search tools can help developers substantially improve their software development efficiency and effectiveness. In recent years, many code search studies have leveraged…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-10-12 Chao Liu , Xin Xia , David Lo , Cuiyun Gao , Xiaohu Yang , John Grundy

Refactoring is a change made to the internal structure of software to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify without changing its observable behaviour. A database refactoring is a small change to the database schema which…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2010-09-09 Patrick O'Beirne

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Isabella Ferreira , Lawrence Arkoh , Anderson Uchôa , Ana Carla Bibiano , Alessandro Garcia , Wesley K. G. Assunção

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Alex Thillen , Niels Mündler , Veselin Raychev , Martin Vechev

Detecting semantic interference remains a challenge in collaborative software development. Recent lightweight static analysis techniques improve efficiency over SDG-based methods, but they still suffer from a high rate of false positives. A…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Victor Lira , Paulo Borba , Rodrigo Bonifácio , Galileu Santos e Matheus barbosa

This paper presents an approach that evaluates best-first search methods to code refactoring. The motivation for code refactoring could be to improve the design, structure, or implementation of an existing program without changing its…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-05-15 Sourena Khanzadeh , Samad Alias Nyein Chan , Richard Valenzano , Manar Alalfi

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Mikel Robredo , Matteo Esposito , Fabio Palomba , Rafael Peñaloza , Valentina Lenarduzzi

Developers spend a significant amount of time searching for code: e.g., to understand how to complete, correct, or adapt their own code for a new context. Unfortunately, the state of the art in code search has not evolved much beyond text…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-06-12 Vineeth Kashyap , David Bingham Brown , Ben Liblit , David Melski , Thomas Reps

Recent advances in language model (LM) agents and function calling have enabled autonomous, feedback-driven systems to solve problems across various digital domains. To better understand the unique limitations of LM agents, we introduce…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Dhruv Gautam , Spandan Garg , Jinu Jang , Neel Sundaresan , Roshanak Zilouchian Moghaddam

Re-finding files from a personal computer is a frequent demand to users. When encountered a difficult re-finding task, people may not recall the attributes used by conventional re-finding methods, such as a file's path, file name, keywords…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2016-02-19 Gangli Liu

Creating web applications for the multiscreen environment is still a challenge. One approach is to transform existing single-screen applications but this has not been done yet automatically or generically. This paper proposes a refactor-ing…

Multimedia · Computer Science 2015-10-20 Mira Sarkis , Cyril Concolato , Jean-Claude Dufourd

Refactoring is an established technique from the object-oriented (OO) programming community to restructure code: it aims at improving software readability, maintainability and extensibility. Although refactoring is not tied to the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Alexander Serebrenik , Tom Schrijvers , Bart Demoen

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Rodrigo Brito , Marco Tulio Valente

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.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Wouter Brinksma , William Wernsen , Evert Verduin , Herman Hilberink , Patrick de Beer , Lex Bijlsma , Harrie Passier

Widely used complex code refactoring tools lack a solid reasoning about the correctness of the transformations they implement, whilst interest in proven correct refactoring is ever increasing as only formal verification can provide true…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-08-25 Dániel Horpácsi , Judit Kőszegi , Zoltán Horváth

Refactoring is an established technique from the OO-community to restructure code: it aims at improving software readability, maintainability and extensibility. Although refactoring is not tied to the OO-paradigm in particular, its ideas…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Tom Schrijvers , Alexander Serebrenik

Many users turn to document retrieval systems (e.g. search engines) to seek answers to controversial questions. Answering such user queries usually require identifying responses within web documents, and aggregating the responses based on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Sihao Chen , Siyi Liu , Xander Uyttendaele , Yi Zhang , William Bruno , Dan Roth

Consider the case where a programmer has written some part of a program, but has left part of the program (such as a method or a function body) incomplete. The goal is to use the context surrounding the missing code to automatically 'figure…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-07-28 Rohan Mukherjee , Swarat Chaudhuri , Chris Jermaine

Large language model (LLM)-based search agents have proven promising for addressing knowledge-intensive problems by incorporating information retrieval capabilities. Existing works largely focus on optimizing the reasoning paradigms of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Tongyu Wen , Guanting Dong , Zhicheng Dou