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How do i refactor this? An empirical study on refactoring trends and topics in Stack Overflow

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Abstract

An essential part of software maintenance and evolution, refactoring is performed by developers, regardless of technology or domain, to improve the internal quality of the system, and reduce its technical debt. However, choosing the appropriate refactoring strategy is not always straightforward, resulting in developers seeking assistance. Although research in refactoring is well-established, with several studies altering between the detection of refactoring opportunities and the recommendation of appropriate code changes, little is known about their adoption in practice. Analyzing the perception of developers is critical to understand better what developers consider to be problematic in their code and how they handle it. Additionally, there is a need for bridging the gap between refactoring, as research, and its adoption in practice, by extracting common refactoring intents that are more suitable for what developers face in reality. In this study, we analyze refactoring discussions on Stack Overflow through a series of quantitative and qualitative experiments. Our results show that Stack Overflow is utilized by a diverse set of developers for refactoring assistance for a variety of technologies. Our observations show five areas that developers typically require help with refactoring– Code Optimization, Tools and IDEs, Architecture and Design Patterns, Unit Testing, and Database. We envision our findings better bridge the support between traditional (or academic) aspects of refactoring and their real-world applicability, including better tool support.

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Notes

  1. https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/sotorrent-org:2020_03_15

  2. https://stackoverflow.com/help/accepted-answer

  3. https://stackoverflow.com/help/tagging

  4. https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/vote-up

  5. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/90187

  6. When reading/comparing these two histograms, it should be noted that the ‘Frequency’ scale for the two charts differs.

  7. In Stack Overflow, tags can only be associated with a question post.

  8. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19756

  9. https://codereview.stackexchange.com

  10. https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/comment

  11. https://data.stackexchange.com/

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the reviewers at ESE for their detailed and invaluable feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA

    Anthony Peruma, Steven Simmons, Eman Abdullah AlOmar, Christian D. Newman & Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer

  2. ETS Montreal, University of Quebec, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Ali Ouni

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Correspondence to Anthony Peruma.

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Communicated by: Shaowei Wang, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen, Sebastian Baltes, Ivano Malavolta, Christoph Treude, and Alexander Serebrenik

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Peruma, A., Simmons, S., AlOmar, E.A. et al. How do i refactor this? An empirical study on refactoring trends and topics in Stack Overflow. Empir Software Eng 27, 11 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-021-10045-x

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