Trends, Opportunities and Challenges of Software Refactoring: A Systematic Literature Review

Software refactoring is a technique that transforms the various types of software artifacts to improve the software internal structure without affecting the external behavior. Refactoring is commonly applied to improve the software quality after a significant amount of features are added. Researchers in the area have studied the different angles of refactoring and developed the right evidence, knowledge and skill. And they published their research findings through journals and conference papers to provide an easy access to everyone. Eventually, the knowledge accumulated in these literatures is huge, so that it needs structuring and organizing. The main purpose of this study is to extend a previously conducted study by covering more literatures and applying a systematic literature review method to increase the accuracy and validity of the study. We study a collection of literature from different electronic databases, published since 1999 to understand and extract the software refactoring knowledge through classification and summarization. The classification and summarization can reveal the research pattern, common concerns and statistics of the published papers in the last fifteen years. The extracted information should help the researchers to formulate better research topics that can solve the crucial problems in software refactoring and save the researchers effort and time.