Related papers: "Refactoring Runaway": Understanding and Mitigatin…
Code readability is fundamental to software quality and maintainability. Poor readability extends development time, increases bug-inducing risks, and contributes to technical debt. With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models, AI…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have substantially influenced various software engineering tasks. Indeed, in the case of software refactoring, traditional LLMs have shown the ability to reduce development time and enhance code quality.…
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…
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…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for automated code refactoring tasks. Although these models can quickly refactor code, the quality may exhibit inconsistencies and unpredictable behavior. In this article, we systematically…
Coding agents are increasingly deployed to autonomously maintain software, including to resolve user-reported issues: a bug report comes in and the agent creates a patch to address it. However, in any real-world deployment, they will…
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…
Agents aspire to eliminate the need for task-specific prompt crafting through autonomous reason-act-observe loops. Still, they are commonly instructed to follow a task-specific plan for guidance, e.g., to resolve software issues following…
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…
Code generation models based on large language models (LLMs) have gained wide adoption, but challenges remain in ensuring safety, accuracy, and controllability, especially for complex tasks. Existing methods often lack dynamic integration…
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), make it potentially feasible to automatically refactor source code with LLMs. However, it remains unclear how well LLMs perform compared to human experts in conducting refactorings…
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…
Coding agents have received significant adoption in software development recently. Unlike traditional LLM-based code completion tools, coding agents work with autonomy (e.g., invoking external tools) and leave visible traces in software…
We introduce TDFlow, a novel test-driven agentic workflow that frames repository-scale software engineering as a test-resolution task, specifically designed to solve human-written tests. Given a set of tests, TDFlow repeatedly proposes,…
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.…
Issue resolution aims to automatically generate patches from given issue descriptions and has attracted significant attention with the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs). However, due to the complexity of software issues and…
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…
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…
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…