Towards Understanding Refactoring Engine Bugs

作者：Haibo Wang, Zhuolin Xu, Huaien Zhang, Nikolaos Tsantalis, Shin Hwei Tan · 发表于：ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1145/3747289 · 被引用次数：2 · 研究领域：Software Engineering Research、Software Testing and Debugging Techniques、Software Reliability and Analysis Research

Refactoring is a critical process in software development, aiming at improving the internal structure of code while preserving its external behavior. Refactoring engines are integral components of modern Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and can automate or semi-automate this process to enhance code readability, reduce complexity, and improve the maintainability of software products. Like traditional software systems, refactoring engines can generate incorrect refactored programs, resulting in unexpected behaviors. In this article, we present the first systematic study of refactoring engine bugs by analyzing bugs arising in three popular refactoring engines (i.e., Eclipse , IntelliJ IDEA , and Netbeans ). We analyzed these bugs according to their refactoring types, symptoms, root causes, and triggering conditions. We obtained 12 findings and provided a series of valuable guidelines for future work on refactoring bug detection and debugging. Furthermore, our transferability study revealed 134 new bugs in the latest version of those refactoring engines. Among the 22 bugs we submitted, 11 bugs are confirmed by their developers, and 7 of them have already been fixed.