research-article

Why we refactor? confessions of GitHub contributors

Authors:

Nikolaos Tsantalis,

Marco Tulio ValenteAuthors Info & Claims

FSE 2016: Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

Pages 858 - 870

https://doi.org/10.1145/2950290.2950305

Published: 01 November 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Refactoring is a widespread practice that helps developers to improve the maintainability and readability of their code. However, there is a limited number of studies empirically investigating the actual motivations behind specific refactoring operations applied by developers. To fill this gap, we monitored Java projects hosted on GitHub to detect recently applied refactorings, and asked the developers to explain the reasons behind their decision to refactor the code. By applying thematic analysis on the collected responses, we compiled a catalogue of 44 distinct motivations for 12 well-known refactoring types. We found that refactoring activity is mainly driven by changes in the requirements and much less by code smells. Extract Method is the most versatile refactoring operation serving 11 different purposes. Finally, we found evidence that the IDE used by the developers affects the adoption of automated refactoring tools.

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Cited By

Tonhão SColanzi TSteinmacher I(2024)A portal to catalog worked examples extracted from open source software projects to support the teaching of Software EngineeringJournal of Software Engineering Research and Development10.5753/jserd.2024.402712:1Online publication date: 19-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.5753/jserd.2024.4027
Wang LChristakis MPradel M(2024)Graph Learning for Extract Class RefactoringProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3650212.3685561(1923-1925)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3650212.3685561
Wang LWang QWang JZhao YWei MQuan ZCui DLi QChristakis MPradel M(2024)HECS: A Hypergraph Learning-Based System for Detecting Extract Class Refactoring OpportunitiesProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3650212.3685307(1851-1855)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3650212.3685307
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Index Terms

Why we refactor? confessions of GitHub contributors
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
      1. Maintaining software
      2. Software evolution
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Software maintenance tools

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

FSE 2016: Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

November 2016

1156 pages

ISBN:9781450342186

DOI:10.1145/2950290

General Chair:
Thomas Zimmermann
Microsoft Research, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Jane Cleland-Huang
University of Notre Dame, USA
,
Zhendong Su
University of California at Davis, USA

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 November 2016

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FSE'16: 24nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

November 13 - 18, 2016

WA, Seattle, USA

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Cited By

Tonhão SColanzi TSteinmacher I(2024)A portal to catalog worked examples extracted from open source software projects to support the teaching of Software EngineeringJournal of Software Engineering Research and Development10.5753/jserd.2024.402712:1Online publication date: 19-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.5753/jserd.2024.4027
Wang LChristakis MPradel M(2024)Graph Learning for Extract Class RefactoringProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3650212.3685561(1923-1925)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3650212.3685561
Wang LWang QWang JZhao YWei MQuan ZCui DLi QChristakis MPradel M(2024)HECS: A Hypergraph Learning-Based System for Detecting Extract Class Refactoring OpportunitiesProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3650212.3685307(1851-1855)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3650212.3685307
Cui DWang QZhao YWang JWei MHu JWang LLi QChristakis MPradel M(2024)One-to-One or One-to-Many? Suggesting Extract Class Refactoring Opportunities with Intra-class Dependency Hypergraph Neural NetworkProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3650212.3680379(1529-1540)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3650212.3680379
Chouchen MBessghaier NBegoug MOuni AAlomar EMkaouer MSpinellis DConstantinou EBacchelli A(2024)How Do Software Developers Use ChatGPT? An Exploratory Study on GitHub Pull RequestsProceedings of the 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3643991.3645084(212-216)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643991.3645084
AlOmar EVenkatakrishnan AMkaouer MNewman COuni ASpinellis DConstantinou EBacchelli A(2024)How to refactor this code? An exploratory study on developer-ChatGPT refactoring conversationsProceedings of the 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3643991.3645081(202-206)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643991.3645081
AlOmar EMkaouer MOuni AStephenson BStone JBattestilli LRebelsky SShoop L(2024)Automating Source Code Refactoring in the ClassroomProceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3626252.3630787(60-66)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626252.3630787
AlOmar EMkaouer MOuni A(2024)Behind the Intent of Extract Method Refactoring: A Systematic Literature ReviewIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.334580050:4(668-694)Online publication date: Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2023.3345800
Moghadam IAfkhami MKamalipour PZaytsev V(2024)Extending Refactoring Detection to Kotlin: A Dataset and Comparative Study2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER60148.2024.00034(267-271)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER60148.2024.00034
Janke MMäder P(2024)7 Dimensions of software change patternsScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-024-54894-014:1Online publication date: 13-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-54894-0
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