One Thousand and One Stories: A Large-Scale Survey of Software Refactoring
This addresses usability challenges in software development tools for developers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing refactoring research.
The paper investigated how developers refactor code, which refactorings are most popular, and why IDE refactoring tools are underused, through a survey of 1,183 IntelliJ IDE users, finding that almost two-thirds spend over an hour per refactoring session and many lack knowledge about IDE features.
Despite the availability of refactoring as a feature in popular IDEs, recent studies revealed that developers are reluctant to use them, and still prefer the manual refactoring of their code. At JetBrains, our goal is to fully support refactoring features in IntelliJ-based IDEs and improve their adoption in practice. Therefore, we start by raising the following main questions. How exactly do people refactor code? What refactorings are the most popular? Why do some developers tend not to use convenient IDE refactoring tools? In this paper, we investigate the raised questions through the design and implementation of a survey targeting 1,183 users of IntelliJ-based IDEs. Our quantitative and qualitative analysis of the survey results shows that almost two-thirds of developers spend more than one hour in a single session refactoring their code; that refactoring types vary greatly in popularity; and that a lot of developers would like to know more about IDE refactoring features but lack the means to do so. These results serve us internally to support the next generation of refactoring features, as well as can help our research community to establish new directions in the refactoring usability research.