Refactoring React-based Web Apps

This dataset was utilized in the research paper titled "Refactorings in React-based Web Apps," accepted for publication in The Journal of Systems and Software. Herein, we present a concise abstract of the study.

Refactoring is a well-known technique to improve software quality. However, there are relevant domains where refactoring has not been studied in-depth before, such as JavaScript front-end frameworks. To fill this gap, we empirically study refactorings that developers perform when maintaining and evolving React-based Web applications. By manually inspecting 320 refactoring commits performed in open source projects, we catalog 69 distinct refactoring operations of which 25 are specific to React code, 17 are adaptations of traditional refactorings for the React context, 22 are traditional refactorings, and six are specific to JavaScript and CSS code. The catalog of refactorings proposed in this article might support practitioners when improving the maintainability of React applications.