Software maintainability is a crucial property of software projects. It can be defined as the
ease with which a software system or component can be modified to be corrected, improved …

Background: Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance and is generally
performed to enforce the best design and implementation practices or to cope with design …

An essential part of software maintenance and evolution, refactoring is performed by
developers, regardless of technology or domain, to improve the internal quality of the …

Abstract The concept of Self-Affirmed Refactoring (SAR) was introduced to explore how
developers document their refactoring activities in commit messages, ie, developers explicit …

Commit messages are the atomic level of software documentation. They provide a natural
language description of the code change and its purpose. Messages are critical for software …

Code refactorings are of pivotal importance in modern code review. Developers may
preserve, revisit, add or undo refactorings through changes' revisions. Their goal is to certify …

Refactoring is widely thought to improve software quality. Several studies, however, claimed
that the effect of refactoring on software quality could be positive, negative, or have no effect …

Context Code refactoring was conceived for enhancing code structures, often in terms of
internal quality attributes such as cohesion and coupling. Developers may have to apply …

Refactoring is the de-facto practice to optimize software health. While several studies
propose refactoring strategies to optimize software design through applying design patterns …

While technical debt grows in absolute numbers as software systems evolve over time, the
density of technical debt (technical debt divided by lines of code) is reduced in some cases …