Related papers: Relating Complexity, Explicitness, Effectiveness o…
Code refactoring is a fundamental software engineering practice aimed at improving code quality and maintainability. Despite its importance, developers often neglect refactoring due to the significant time, effort, and resources it…
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…
The primary value of AI agents in software development lies in their ability to extend the developer's capacity for reasoning and action, not to supplant human involvement. To showcase how to use agents working in tandem with developers, we…
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…
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 remodularization through clustering is a common practice to improve internal software quality. However, the true benefit of software clustering is only realized if developers follow through with the recommended refactoring…
Advances in technologies like artificial intelligence and metaverse have led to a proliferation of software systems in business and everyday life. With this widespread penetration, the carbon emissions of software are rapidly growing as…
Background: Search-based refactoring involves searching for a sequence of refactorings to achieve specific objectives. Although a typical objective is improving code quality, a different perspective is also required; the searched sequence…
Agentic coding tools, such as OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor, are transforming the software engineering landscape. These AI-powered systems function as autonomous teammates capable of planning and executing complex development tasks.…
Context. Code refactoring improves software quality without changing external behavior. Despite its advantages, its benefits are hindered by the considerable cost of time, resources, and continuous effort it demands. Aim. Understanding why…
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…
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…
This paper reports an empirical study on refactoring activity in three Java software systems. We investigated some questions on refactoring activity, to confirm or disagree on conclusions that have been drawn from previous empirical…
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…
Catalogs of refactoring have key importance in software maintenance and evolution, since developers rely on such documents to understand and perform refactoring operations. Furthermore, these catalogs constitute a reference guide for…
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…
Context: Refactoring is recognized as an effective practice to maintain evolving software systems. For software libraries, we study how library developers refactor their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), especially when it impacts…
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…
Refactorings must not alter the program's functionality. However, not all refactorings fulfill this requirement. Hence, one must explicitly check that a refactoring does not alter the functionality. Since one rarely has a formal…
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…