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Why Developers Refactor Source Code: A Mining-based Study

Authors:

Jevgenija Pantiuchina,

Fiorella Zampetti,

Simone Scalabrino,

Valentina Piantadosi,

Gabriele Bavota,

Massimiliano Di PentaAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), Volume 29, Issue 4

Article No.: 29, Pages 1 - 30

https://doi.org/10.1145/3408302

Published: 26 September 2020 Publication History

Abstract

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 their findings, we present a large-scale study quantitatively and qualitatively investigating why developers perform refactoring in open source projects. First, we mine 287,813 refactoring operations performed in the history of 150 systems. Using this dataset, we investigate the interplay between refactoring operations and process (e.g., previous changes/fixes) and product (e.g., quality metrics) metrics. Then, we manually analyze 551 merged pull requests implementing refactoring operations and classify the motivations behind the implemented refactorings (e.g., removal of code duplication). Our results led to (i) quantitative evidence of the relationship existing between certain process/product metrics and refactoring operations and (ii) a detailed taxonomy, generalizing and complementing the ones existing in the literature, of motivations pushing developers to refactor source code.

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Coelho FTsantalis NMassoni TAlves E(2025)A qualitative study on refactorings induced by code reviewEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10560-730:1Online publication date: 1-Feb-2025
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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3661167.3661228
Shahoor AYi JKim DChristakis MPradel M(2024)Preserving Reactiveness: Understanding and Improving the Debugging Practice of Blocking-Call BugsProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3650212.3680319(768-780)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
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Index Terms

Why Developers Refactor Source Code: A Mining-based Study
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
      1. Maintaining software

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cover image ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology Volume 29, Issue 4

Continuous Special Section: AI and SE

October 2020

307 pages

ISSN:1049-331X

EISSN:1557-7392

DOI:10.1145/3409663

Editor:
Mauro Pezzè
Università della Svizzera italiana and Università di Milano-Bicocca, Switzerland

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Publication History

Published: 26 September 2020

Accepted: 01 June 2020

Revised: 01 May 2020

Received: 01 December 2019

Published in TOSEM Volume 29, Issue 4

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Cited By

Coelho FTsantalis NMassoni TAlves E(2025)A qualitative study on refactorings induced by code reviewEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10560-730:1Online publication date: 1-Feb-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-024-10560-7
Aman HAmasaki SYokogawa TKawahara M(2024)A Quantitative Investigation of Trends in Confusing Variable Pairs Through Commits: Do Confusing Variable Pairs Survive?Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3661167.3661228(90-99)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2024
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