Industry's Cry for Tools that Support Large-Scale Refactoring

Abstract

Software refactoring plays an important role in software engineering. Developers often turn to refactoring when they want to restructure software to improve its quality without changing its external behavior. Compared to small-scale (floss) refactoring, many refactoring efforts are much larger, requiring entire teams and months of effort, and the role of tools in these efforts is not as well studied. This short paper introduces an industry survey that we conducted. Results from 107 developers demonstrate that projects commonly go through multiple large-scale refactorings, each of which requires considerable effort. While there is often a desire to refactor, other business concerns such as developing new features often take higher priority. Our study finds that developers use several categories of tools to support large-scale refactoring and rely more heavily on general-purpose tools like IDEs than on tools designed specifically to support refactoring. Tool support varies across the different activities (spanning communication, reasoning, and technical activities), with some particularly challenging activities seeing little use of tools in practice. Our study demonstrates a clear need for better large-scale refactoring tools.