30 Years of Software Refactoring Research:A Systematic Literature Review

Due to the growing complexity of software systems, there has been a dramatic increase and industry demand for tools and techniques on software refactoring in the last ten years, defined traditionally as a set of program transformations intended to improve the system design while preserving the behavior. Refactoring studies are expanded beyond code-level restructuring to be applied at different levels (architecture, model, requirements, etc.), adopted in many domains beyond the object-oriented paradigm (cloud computing, mobile, web, etc.), used in industrial settings and considered objectives beyond improving the design to include other non-functional requirements (e.g., improve performance, security, etc.). Thus, challenges to be addressed by refactoring work are, nowadays, beyond code transformation to include, but not limited to, scheduling the opportune time to carry refactoring, recommendations of specific refactoring activities, detection of refactoring opportunities, and testing the correctness of applied refactorings. Therefore, the refactoring research efforts are fragmented over several research communities, various domains, and objectives. To structure the field and existing research results, this paper provides a systematic literature review and analyzes the results of 3183 research papers on refactoring covering the last three decades to offer the most scalable and comprehensive literature review of existing refactoring research studies. Based on this survey, we created a taxonomy to classify the existing research, identified research trends, and highlighted gaps in the literature and avenues for further research.