Industry experiences with large-scale refactoring
Open accessAbstract
Software refactoring plays an important role in software engineering. Developers often turn to refactoring when they want to restructure software to improve its quality without changing its external behavior. Small-scale (floss) refactoring is common in industry and is often performed by a single developer in short sessions, even though developers do much of this work manually instead of using refactoring tools. However, some refactoring efforts are much larger in scale, requiring entire teams and months or years of effort, and the role of tools in these efforts is not as well studied. In this paper, we report on a survey we conducted with developers to understand large-scale refactoring and its tool support needs. Our results from 107 industry developers demonstrate that projects commonly go through multiple large-scale refactorings, each of which requires considerable effort. Our study finds that developers use several categories of tools to support large-scale refactoring and rely more heavily on general-purpose tools like IDEs than on tools designed specifically to support refactoring. Tool support varies across the different activities, with some particularly challenging activities seeing little use of tools in practice. Furthermore, our analysis suggests significant impact is possible through advances in tool support for comprehension and testing, as well as through support for the needs of business stakeholders.
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Impact analysis for architecture refactoring requires a conceptual grasp of overall code structure and deep understanding of design decisions of a software system.
“Impact analysis for architecture refactoring requires a conceptual grasp of the overall code structure, as well as a deep understanding of design decisions of a software system, as discussed in the literature (e.g., [37]).”
From Software Architecture in Practice: Challenges and Opportunities (2023) · cites this paper as [37]
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- Authors
- Ivers, J., Nord, R. L., Ozkaya, I., Seifried, C., Timperley, C. S., & Kessentini, M.
- Affiliations
- Carnegie Mellon University (US)
- Carnegie Mellon University, USA
- Oakland University (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2022-11-07
- Pages
- 1544-1554
- OpenAlex
- W4308643086
- Cited by
- 19
- References
- 29
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 3
- FWCI
- 3.58
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
- Funders
- U.S. Department of Defense (FA8702-15-D-0002, Contract No. FA8702-15-D-0002)
- Carnegie Mellon University (FA8702-15-D-0002)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies
- Keywords
- refactoring, refactoring tools, developer survey, integrated development environment, program comprehension, software testing, software restructuring
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