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Related papers: Diagnosing Refactoring Dangers

200 papers

We present a novel approach to detect refactoring opportunities by measuring the participation of references between types in instances of patterns representing design flaws. This technique is validated using an experiment where we analyse…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2011-03-17 Jens Dietrich , Catherine McCartin , Ewan Tempero , Syed M. Ali Shah

In this paper, we present a tertiary systematic literature review of previous surveys, secondary systematic literature reviews, and systematic mappings. We identify the main observations (what we know) and challenges (what we do not know)…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-08-11 Guilherme Lacerda , Fabio Petrillo , Marcelo Pimenta , Yann Gael Gueheneuc

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Ali Ouni , Marouane Kessentini

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

Programming problems can be solved in a multitude of functionally correct ways, but the quality of these solutions (e.g. readability, maintainability) can vary immensely. When code quality is poor, symptoms emerge in the form of 'code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-11 Ivan Tan , Christopher M. Poskitt

Refactoring enhances software quality without altering its functional behaviors. Understanding the refactoring activities of developers is crucial to improving software maintainability. With the increasing use of machine learning (ML)…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Shayan Noei , Heng Li , Ying Zou

Developers sometimes mix behavior-preserving modifications, such as refactorings, with behavior-altering modifications, such as feature additions. Several approaches have been proposed to support understanding such modifications by…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Kota Someya , Lei Chen , Michael J. Decker , Shinpei Hayashi

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Jiaqian Liu , Kenneth Addo , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Christian Newman , Ali Ouni , Zhe Yu

To refactor already working code while keeping reliability, compatibility and perhaps security, we can borrow ideas from micropass/nanopass compilers. By treating the procedure of software refactoring as composing code transformations, and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Yu Liu

Context : Software comprehension and maintenance activities, such as refactoring, are said to be negatively impacted by software complexity. The methods used to measure software product and processes complexity have been thoroughly debated…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-03-07 João Caldeira , Fernando Brito e Abreu , Jorge Cardoso , José Reis

Software refactoring is the process of changing the structure of software without any alteration in its behavior and functionality. Presuming it is carried out in appropriate opportunities, refactoring enhances software quality…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-01-20 Hanieh Khosravi , Abbas Rasoolzadegan

With the rapid development of deep learning, the implementation of intricate algorithms and substantial data processing have become standard elements of deep learning projects. As a result, the code has become progressively complex as the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Siqi Wang , Xing Hu , Bei Wang , Wenxin Yao , Xin Xia , Xinyu Wang

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Ziga Kovacic , Justin T. Chiu , Celine Lee , Wenting Zhao , Kevin Ellis

Context: Code refactoring is widely recognized as an essential software engineering practice that improves the understandability and maintainability of source code. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities through mining…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Eman Abdullah AlOmar

Tightly coupled and interdependent systems inhibit productivity by requiring developers to carefully coordinate their changes, even when modifying subsystems that should be independent of one another. Poor architectural decisions frequently…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Jason Lefever , Yuanfang Cai , Rick Kazman , Hongzhou Fang

Context. Refactoring has been widely investigated in the past in relation to production code quality, yet still little is known on how developers apply refactoring on test code. Specifically, there is still a lack of investigation into how…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Luana Martins , Valeria Pontillo , Heitor Costa , Filomena Ferrucci , Fabio Palomba , Ivan Machado

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

We present Lean Refactor, a plug-and-play retrieval-augmented agentic framework for multi-objective, controllable, and version-robust refactoring of Lean proofs. LLM-generated proofs are notoriously correct-but-verbose and brittle across…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Jialin Lu , Soonho Kong , Rodrigo Stehling , Kaiyu Yang , Zhangyang Wang , Weiran Sun , Wuyang Chen

Software vulnerabilities often persist or re-emerge even after being fixed, revealing the complex interplay between code evolution and socio-technical factors. While source code metrics provide useful indicators of vulnerabilities, software…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Samiha Shimmi , Nicholas M. Synovic , Mona Rahimi , George K. Thiruvathukal

To meet project timelines or budget constraints, developers intentionally deviate from writing optimal code to feasible code in what is known as incurring Technical Debt (TD). Furthermore, as part of planning their correction, developers…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-14 Anthony Peruma , Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Christian D. Newman , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Ali Ouni