One thousand and one stories: A large-scale survey of software refactoring

Yaroslav Golubev, Zarina Kurbatova, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Timofey Bryksin, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    17 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    Despite the availability of refactoring as a feature in popular IDEs, recent studies revealed that developers are reluctant to use them, and still prefer the manual refactoring of their code. At JetBrains, our goal is to fully support refactoring features in IntelliJ-based IDEs and improve their adoption in practice. Therefore, we start by raising the following main questions. How exactly do people refactor code? What refactorings are the most popular? Why do some developers tend not to use convenient IDE refactoring tools? In this paper, we investigate the raised questions through the design and implementation of a survey targeting 1,183 users of IntelliJ-based IDEs. Our quantitative and qualitative analysis of the survey results shows that almost two-thirds of developers spend more than one hour in a single session refactoring their code; that refactoring types vary greatly in popularity; and that a lot of developers would like to know more about IDE refactoring features but lack the means to do so. These results serve us internally to support the next generation of refactoring features, as well as can help our research community to establish new directions in the refactoring usability research.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationESEC/FSE 2021 - Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
    EditorsDiomidis Spinellis
    Pages1303-1313
    Number of pages11
    ISBN (Electronic)9781450385626
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 20 Aug 2021
    Event29th ACM Joint Meeting European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2021 - Virtual, Online, Greece
    Duration: 23 Aug 202128 Aug 2021

    Publication series

    NameESEC/FSE 2021 - Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

    Conference

    Conference29th ACM Joint Meeting European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2021
    Country/TerritoryGreece
    CityVirtual, Online
    Period23/08/2128/08/21

    Keywords

    • IDE Refactoring Features
    • Refactorings
    • Software Maintenance

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