Related papers: Diagnosing Refactoring Dangers
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…
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…
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…
Context: Refactoring is the art of modifying the design of a system without altering its behavior. The idea is to reorganize variables, classes and methods to facilitate their future adaptations and comprehension. As the concept of behavior…
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…
Third-party library dependencies are commonplace in today's software development. With the growing threat of security vulnerabilities, applying security fixes in a timely manner is important to protect software systems. As such, the…
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…
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…
Refactoring is the practice of improving software quality without altering its external behavior. Developers intuitively refactor their code for multiple purposes, such as improving program comprehension, reducing code complexity, dealing…
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…
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…
In modern software engineering, build systems play the crucial role of facilitating the conversion of source code into software artifacts. Recent research has explored high-level causes of build failures, but has largely overlooked the…
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…
Commits often involve refactorings -- behavior-preserving code modifications aiming at software design improvements. Refactoring operations pose a challenge to code reviewers, as distinguishing them from behavior-altering changes is often…
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…
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…
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…
Refactoring is an activity that improves the internal structure of the code without altering its external behavior. When performed on the production code, the tests can be used to verify that the external behavior of the production code is…
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…
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…