A Systematic Literature Review on Software Refactoring

Due to the growing complexity of software systems, there has been a dramatic increase in research and industry demand on refactoring. Refactoring research nowadays addresses challenges beyond code transformation to include, but not limited to, scheduling the opportune time to carry refactoring, recommending specific refactoring activities, detecting refactoring opportunities and testing the correctness of applied refactoring. Very few studies focused on the challenges that practitioners face when refactoring software systems and what should be the current refactoring research focus from the developers’perspective and based on the current literature. Without such knowledge, tool builders invest in the wrong direction, and researchers miss many opportunities for improving the practice of refactoring. In this thesis, we collected papers from several publication sources and analyzed them to identify what do developers ask about refactoring and the relevant topics in the field We found that developers and researchers are asking about design patterns, design and user interface refactoring, web services, parallel programming, and mobile apps. We also identified what popular refactoring challenges are the most difficult and the current important topics and questions related to refactoring. Moreover, we discovered gaps between existing research on refactoring and the challenges developers face.