One Thousand and One Stories: A Large-Scale Survey of Software Refactoring
Yaroslav Golubev, Zarina Kurbatova, Eman Abdullah AlOmar, Timofey, Bryksin, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer

TL;DR
This large-scale survey investigates how developers use refactoring tools in IntelliJ IDEs, revealing usage patterns, preferences, and knowledge gaps to improve refactoring support and adoption.
Contribution
The paper provides comprehensive insights into refactoring practices, preferences, and obstacles among IDE users, informing future tool enhancements and usability research.
Findings
Two-thirds of developers spend over an hour refactoring per session
Refactoring types vary greatly in popularity
Many developers want to learn more about IDE refactoring features
Abstract
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…
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