One Thousand and One Stories: A Large-Scale Survey of Software Refactoring

Understand

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.