Revisiting the refactoring mechanics

Context: Refactoring is a key practice in agile methodologies used by a number of developers, and available in popular IDEs. However, it is unclear whether the refactoring mechanics have the same meaning for developers.Objective: In this article, we revisit the refactoring mechanics.Method: We conduct a survey with 107 developers of popular Java projects on GitHub. We asked them about the output of seven refactoring types applied to small programs.Results: Developers do not expect the same outputs in all questions. The refactoring mechanics is based on developers' experience for a number of them (71.02%). Some developers (75.70%) use IDEs to apply refactorings. However, the output yielded by the preferred IDE is different from what they want.Conclusion: Developers and IDE developers use different mechanics for most refactoring types considered in our survey, and this may impact developers' communication.