Abstract
Refactoring is a crucial practice used by many developers, available in popular IDEs, like Eclipse. Moreover, refactoring detection tools, such as RefDiff and RefactoringMiner, help improve the comprehension of refactoring application changes. In this article, we better understand to what extent refactoring detection tools (RefDiff and RefactoringMiner) identify refactoring operations that developers apply in practice. We survey with 53 developers of popular Java projects on GitHub. We asked them to identify six refactoring transformations applied to small programs. There is no unanimity in all questions of our survey. Refactoring detection tools do not detect many refactoring operations expected by developers. In 4 out of 6 questions, most developers prefer the Eclipse refactoring mechanics. The results highlight the importance of diving deep into the refactoring mechanics and defining a baseline. Empirical studies focused on mining refactoring operations may be limited by an incomplete or unrepresentative sample of such operations, thus posing a challenge for researchers in this field.
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