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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

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Haibo Wang , Zhuolin Xu , Huaien Zhang , Nikolaos Tsantalis , Shin Hwei Tan

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-02-11 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Hussein AlRubaye , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Ali Ouni , Marouane Kessentini

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Benjamin Ritz , Aleksandar Karakaš , Denis Helic

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

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 often refactor code to improve the maintainability and comprehension of the software. There are many studies on refactoring activities in traditional software systems. However, refactoring in data-intensive systems is not well…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Biruk Asmare Muse , Foutse Khomh , Giuliano Antoniol

Due to the growing complexity of software systems, there has been a dramatic increase and industry demand for tools and techniques on software refactoring in the last ten years, defined traditionally as a set of program transformations…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-07-07 Chaima Abid , Vahid Alizadeh , Marouane Kessentini , Thiago do Nascimento Ferreira , Danny Dig

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

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

While technical debt grows in absolute numbers as software systems evolve over time, the density of technical debt (technical debt divided by lines of code) is reduced in some cases. This can be explained by either the application of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-10-20 George Digkas , Alexander Chatzigeorgiou , Apostolos Ampatzoglou , Paris Avgeriou

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

Nowadays, software testing professionals are commonly required to develop coding skills to work on test automation. One essential skill required from those who code is the ability to implement code refactoring, a valued quality aspect 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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-05-18 Ayano Ikegami , Raula Gaikovina Kula , Bodin Chinthanet , Vittunyuta Maeprasart , Ali Ouni , Takashi Ishio , Kenichi Matsumoto

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

Producing code of good quality is an essential skill in software development. Code quality is an aspect of software quality that concerns the directly observable properties of code, such as decomposition, modularization, and code flow. Code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Eduardo Carneiro Oliveira , Hieke Keuning , Johan Jeuring

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

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

Fixing bugs is an important phase in software development and maintenance. In practice, the process of bug fixing may conflict with the release schedule. Such confliction leads to a trade-off between software quality and release schedule,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-04-18 Jifeng Xuan , Yan Hu , He Jiang

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