Refactoring-aware code review

Ge, Xi; Sarkar, Saurabh; Witschey, Jim; Murphy-Hill, Emerson

doi:10.1109/vlhcc.2017.8103453

Cited by 31 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Both studies found the following general code reviewing challenges: (1 ) finding defects, (2 ) improving the code, and (3) increasing knowledge transfer. Ge et al [16] developed a refactoring-aware code review tool, called ReviewFactor, that automatically detects refactoring edits and separates refactoring from non-refactoring changes with the focus on five refactoring types. The tool was intended to support developers' review process by distinguishing between refactoring and non-refactoring changes, but it does not provide any insights on the quality of the performed refactoring.…”

Section: B Refactoring Awareness and Code Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Refactoring Practices in the Context of Modern Code Review: An Industrial Case Study at Xerox

AlOmar

Alrubaye

Mkaouer

et al. 2021

2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP)

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Modern code review is a common and essential practice employed in both industrial and open-source projects to improve software quality, share knowledge, and ensure conformance with coding standards. During code review, developers may inspect and discuss various changes including refactoring activities before merging code changes in the code base. To date, code review has been extensively studied to explore its general challenges, best practices and outcomes, and socio-technical aspects. However, little is known about how refactoring activities are being reviewed, perceived, and practiced.This study aims to reveal insights into how reviewers develop a decision about accepting or rejecting a submitted refactoring request, and what makes such review challenging. We present an industrial case study with 24 professional developers at Xerox. Particularly, we study the motivations, documentation practices, challenges, verification, and implications of refactoring activities during code review.Our study delivers several important findings. Our results report the lack of a proper procedure to follow by developers when documenting their refactorings for review. Our survey with reviewers has also revealed several difficulties related to understanding the refactoring intent and implications on the functional and non-functional aspects of the software. In light of our findings, we recommended a procedure to properly document refactoring activities, as part of our survey feedback.

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Section: B Refactoring Awareness and Code Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Refactoring Practices in the Context of Modern Code Review: An Industrial Case Study at Xerox

AlOmar

Alrubaye

Mkaouer

et al. 2021

2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Refactoring should ensure the consistency of program behavior and the correctness of software functionality while avoiding introducing new concurrent bugs after refactoring. Consistency validation for concurrency-oriented refactoring is more complicated than that for sequence-oriented refactoring (Foster et al, 2012; Ge et al, 2017; Xi and Murphy-Hill, 2014).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A survey of concurrency-oriented refactoring

Zhang

2020

Concurrent Engineering

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Refactoring has become an effective approach to convert sequential programs into concurrent programs. Many refactoring algorithms and tools are proposed to assist developers in writing high-performance concurrent programs. Although researchers actively conduct surveys on refactoring, we are not aware of any survey that summarizes, categorizes and discusses concurrency-oriented refactoring. To this end, this paper presents a survey that investigates how refactoring assists with concurrent programming. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first survey that summarizes the state-of-the-art, concurrency-oriented refactoring. First, we design six research questions addressing the concurrent structure, programming language, performance improvement and consistency evaluation. Second, we answer these questions by examining the related papers and then present the results to show how refactoring provides support for concurrent programming after a decade of development, such as transforming the concurrent structures, supporting parallel language, and improving performance. Finally, we summarize the related works and present the future trends.

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“…The obtained results entail implications for both researchers and practitioners. As for researchers, the study highlights the need for better refactoring support, in particular for better planning/pondering it (e.g., in the direction of identifying its possible impact [16]), or automatically testing/verifying the change made, or further work in the direction of supporting refactoring review [27]. As for practitioners, this study warns them by pointing out that refactoring is only in theory behavior-preserving, therefore it must be planned with appropriate verification & validation activities aimed at reducing its risks.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the relationship between refactoring actions and bugs: a differentiated replication

Penta

Bavota

Zampetti

2020

Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Softw

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Software refactoring aims at improving code quality while preserving the system's external behavior. Although in principle refactoring is a behavior-preserving activity, a study presented by Bavota et al. in 2012 reported the proneness of some refactoring actions (e.g., pull up method) to induce faults. The study was performed by mining refactoring activities and bugs from three systems. Taking profit of the advances made in the mining software repositories field (e.g., better tools to detect refactoring actions at commit-level granularity), we present a differentiated replication of the work by Bavota et al. in which we (i) overcome some of the weaknesses that affect their experimental design, (ii) answer the same research questions of the original study on a much larger dataset (3 vs 103 systems), and (iii) complement the quantitative analysis of the relationship between refactoring and bugs with a qualitative, manual inspection of commits aimed at verifying the extent to which refactoring actions trigger bug-fixing activities. The results of our quantitative analysis confirm the findings of the replicated study, while the qualitative analysis partially demystifies the role played by refactoring actions in the bug introduction. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software reliability; Designing software.

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Refactoring-aware code review

Cited by 31 publications

References 28 publications

Refactoring Practices in the Context of Modern Code Review: An Industrial Case Study at Xerox

Refactoring Practices in the Context of Modern Code Review: An Industrial Case Study at Xerox

A survey of concurrency-oriented refactoring

On the relationship between refactoring actions and bugs: a differentiated replication

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