One Thousand and One Stories: a Large-scale Survey of Software Refactoring
summary
A large-scale study compares 171 refactoring PRs vs 171 non-refactoring PRs and finds refactoring pull requests take longer to reach accept/reject decisions and provoke more back-and-forth discussion. The research supplements that with over 1,000 developers interviewed about IntelliJ usage and reports concrete tool adoption: renaming mostly via IDE; extracting ~50% via IDE; moving ~33% via IDE. A clear actionable recommendation is to document Intent, How, Implications so reviewers can evaluate refactorings faster.
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