TY - GEN
T1 - An Exploratory Study on Refactoring Documentation in Issues Handling
AU - Alomar, Eman Abdullah
AU - Peruma, Anthony
AU - Mkaouer, Mohamed Wiem
AU - Newman, Christian D.
AU - Ouni, Ali
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 ACM.
PY - 2022/10/17
Y1 - 2022/10/17
N2 - Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of para-mount importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are used by most software projects enabling developers, quality assurance, managers, and users to submit feature requests and other tasks such as bug fixing and code review. Although recent studies explored how to document refactoring in commit messages, little is known about how developers describe their refactoring needs in issues. In this study, we aim at exploring developer-reported refactoring changes in issues to better understand what developers consider to be problematic in their code and how they handle it. Our approach relies on text mining 45,477 refactoring-related issues and identifying refactoring patterns from a diverse corpus of 77 Java projects by investigating issues associated with 15,833 refactoring operations and developers' explicit refactoring intention. Our results show that (1) developers mostly use move refactoring related terms/phrases to target refactoring-related issues; and (2) developers tend to explicitly mention the improvement of specific quality attributes and focus on duplicate code removal. We envision our findings enabling tool builders to support developers with automated documentation of refactoring changes in issues.
AB - Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of para-mount importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are used by most software projects enabling developers, quality assurance, managers, and users to submit feature requests and other tasks such as bug fixing and code review. Although recent studies explored how to document refactoring in commit messages, little is known about how developers describe their refactoring needs in issues. In this study, we aim at exploring developer-reported refactoring changes in issues to better understand what developers consider to be problematic in their code and how they handle it. Our approach relies on text mining 45,477 refactoring-related issues and identifying refactoring patterns from a diverse corpus of 77 Java projects by investigating issues associated with 15,833 refactoring operations and developers' explicit refactoring intention. Our results show that (1) developers mostly use move refactoring related terms/phrases to target refactoring-related issues; and (2) developers tend to explicitly mention the improvement of specific quality attributes and focus on duplicate code removal. We envision our findings enabling tool builders to support developers with automated documentation of refactoring changes in issues.
KW - Refactoring documentation
KW - issues
KW - mining soft-ware repositories
KW - software quality
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85134008725
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85134008725#tab=citedBy
U2 - 10.1145/3524842.3528525
DO - 10.1145/3524842.3528525
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85134008725
T3 - Proceedings - 2022 Mining Software Repositories Conference, MSR 2022
SP - 107
EP - 111
BT - Proceedings - 2022 Mining Software Repositories Conference, MSR 2022
T2 - 2022 Mining Software Repositories Conference, MSR 2022
Y2 - 23 May 2022 through 24 May 2022
ER -