English
Related papers

Related papers: An Empirical Study of Refactoring Engine Bugs

200 papers

Refactoring is the process of restructuring existing code without changing its external behavior while improving its internal structure. Refactoring engines are integral components of modern Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Haibo Wang , Zhuolin Xu , Shin Hwei Tan

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

Software developers attempt to reproduce software bugs to understand their erroneous behaviours and to fix them. Unfortunately, they often fail to reproduce (or fix) them, which leads to faulty, unreliable software systems. However, to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-08-12 Mohammad Masudur Rahman , Foutse Khomh , Marco Castelluccio

Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of paramount importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are used by most software projects enabling developers, quality assurance, managers, and users to submit…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Anthony Peruma , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Christian D. Newman , Ali Ouni

Inspection of code changes is a time-consuming task that constitutes a big part of everyday work of software engineers. Existing IDEs provide little information about the semantics of code changes within the file editor view. Therefore…

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-08-07 Danilo Silva , Nikolaos Tsantalis , Marco Tulio Valente

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Anthony Peruma , Steven Simmons , Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Christian D. Newman , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Ali Ouni

Refactoring tools in popular Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) can introduce unintended behavioral changes or compilation errors, a persistent challenge that undermines developer trust in automated transformations. Traditional…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Rohit Gheyi , Rian Melo , Jonhnanthan Oliveira , Marcio Ribeiro , Baldoino Fonseca

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-09-25 Massimiliano Di Penta , Gabriele Bavota , Fiorella Zampetti

Refactoring is the art of improving the design of a system without altering its external behavior. Refactoring has become a well established and disciplined software engineering practice that has attracted a significant amount of research…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-26 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Anthony Peruma , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Christian Newman , Ali Ouni , Marouane Kessentini

Python is a widely adopted programming language, valued for its simplicity and flexibility. However, its dynamic type system poses significant challenges for automated refactoring - an essential practice in software evolution aimed at…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Jonhnanthan Oliveira , Rohit Gheyi , Márcio Ribeiro , Alessandro Garcia

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

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-02-16 James Ivers , Robert L. Nord , Ipek Ozkaya , Chris Seifried , Christopher S. Timperley , Marouane Kessentini

Refactoring is the process of changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behavior of the code yet improves its internal structure. Not only researchers, but also practitioners, need to know about past…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-08-08 Eunjong Choi , Kenji Fujiwara , Norihiro Yoshida , Shinpei Hayashi

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 Engineering · Computer Science 2019-05-20 Rodrigo Morales , Foutse Khomh , Giuliano Antoniol

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 Engineering · Computer Science 2015-02-13 S. H. Kannangara , W. M. J. I. Wijayanayake

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-11-16 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Tianjia Wang , Vaibhavi Raut , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Christian Newman , Ali Ouni

Despite the availability of refactoring as a feature in popular IDEs, recent studies revealed that developers are reluctant to use them, and still prefer the manual refactoring of their code. At JetBrains, our goal is to fully support…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Yaroslav Golubev , Zarina Kurbatova , Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Timofey Bryksin , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Zhao Tian , Zifan Zhang , Tao Xiao , Dong Wang , Masanari Kondo , Junjie Chen , Yasutaka Kamei

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…

‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›