In collaborative software development, multiple contributors frequently change the source
code in parallel to implement new features, fix bugs, refactor existing code, and make other …

Developers constantly perform code changes throughout the lifetime of a project. These
changes may induce the introduction of design problems (design decay) over time, which …

Catalogs of refactoring have key importance in software maintenance and evolution, since
developers rely on such documents to understand and perform refactoring operations …

Context: code refactoring is a code transformation that aims to improve software quality. A
composite refactoring (or, simply, composite) is defined by two or more interrelated …

Refactorings are behavior-preserving code transformations. They are a recommended
software development practice and are now a standard feature in modern IDEs. There are …

The incidence of code smells is often associated with software quality degradation. Several
studies present the importance of detecting and tackling the incidence of smells in the …

Refactorings are behavior-preserving code transformations. They are a recommended
software development practice and are now a standard feature in modern IDEs. There are …

Refactoring detection tools, such as RefactoringMiner and RefDiff, are helpful to study
refactorings applied to software repositories. To evaluate them, the tools' authors study …

Refactoring is a non-trivial maintenance activity. Developers spend time and effort
refactoring code to remove structural problems, ie, code smells. Recent studies indicated …

Reading and understanding code are crucial activities during the software evolution and
maintenance process. However, there are several factors that can affect this understanding …