Industry experiences with large-scale refactoring

• DOI: 10.1145/3540250.3558954
• Publication Date: 2022-11-09T20:46:22Z
• Authors: James Ivers; Robert L. Nord; Ipek Ozkaya; Chris Seifried; Christopher S. Ti...; Marouane Kessentini
• Keywords: Code refactoring; Technical debt; Restructuring; Software Maintenance; Program comprehension

Software refactoring plays an important role in software engineering. Developers often turn to when they want restructure improve its quality without changing external behavior. Small-scale (floss) is common industry and performed by a single developer short sessions, even though developers do much of this work manually instead using tools. However, some efforts are larger scale, requiring entire teams months or years effort, the tools these not as well studied. In paper, we report on survey conducted with understand large-scale tool support needs. Our results from 107 demonstrate that projects commonly go through multiple refactorings, each which requires considerable effort. study finds use several categories rely more heavily general-purpose like IDEs than designed specifically refactoring. Tool varies across different activities, particularly challenging activities seeing little practice. Furthermore, our analysis suggests significant impact possible advances for comprehension testing, needs business stakeholders.