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

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 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.