A Systematic Mapping of Literature on Software Refactoring Tools

Refactoring consists of improving the internal structure of the code without changing the external behavior of a software system. However, the task of refactoring is very costly in the development of an information system. Thus, many tools have been proposed to support refactoring the source code. In order to find tools cited in the literature, this work presents a Systematic Literature Mapping about refactoring. As a result, this paper summarizes the refactoring tools that have been published in the last 5 years in terms of the tool profiles developed, which programming languages have support for refactoring and which are the main refactoring strategies that are handled by tools. It has been identified that publications on refactoring have remained constant over the past 5 years. Also, most of the refactoring works describe tools, being they for systems written in the Java language, that perform code refactoring automatically and the main refactorings are: Move Method, Pull Up Method, Extract Class and Code Clone. Finally, we performed an analysis of the data returned by the DBLP library. As a result, it was observed that the papers returned by the DBLP have a high level of similarity with the other research bases studied.