Behind the Intent of Extract Method Refactoring: A Systematic Literature Review
Eman Abdullah AlOmar, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Ali Ouni

TL;DR
This systematic literature review analyzes 83 studies on Extract Method refactoring, highlighting current techniques, developer involvement, and benchmarking challenges to guide future research and practice improvements.
Contribution
The paper provides a comprehensive classification and catalog of Extract Method approaches, revealing research focus areas and identifying limitations in existing benchmarks.
Findings
38.6% of studies focus on code clones
Many tools involve developers in decision-making
Existing benchmarks are heterogeneous and lack standardization
Abstract
Code refactoring is widely recognized as an essential software engineering practice to improve the understandability and maintainability of the source code. The Extract Method refactoring is considered as "Swiss army knife" of refactorings, as developers often apply it to improve their code quality. In recent years, several studies attempted to recommend Extract Method refactorings allowing the collection, analysis, and revelation of actionable data-driven insights about refactoring practices within software projects. In this paper, we aim at reviewing the current body of knowledge on existing Extract Method refactoring research and explore their limitations and potential improvement opportunities for future research efforts. Hence, researchers and practitioners begin to be aware of the state-of-the-art and identify new research opportunities in this context. We review the body of…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Engineering Research · Software System Performance and Reliability · Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
