  Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of paramount
importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are used by most
software projects enabling developers, quality assurance, managers, and users
to submit feature requests and other tasks such as bug fixing and code review.
Although recent studies explored how to document refactoring in commit
messages, little is known about how developers describe their refactoring needs
in issues. In this study, we aim at exploring developer-reported refactoring
changes in issues to better understand what developers consider to be
problematic in their code and how they handle it. Our approach relies on text
mining 45,477 refactoring-related issues and identifying refactoring patterns
from a diverse corpus of 77 Java projects by investigating issues associated
with 15,833 refactoring operations and developers' explicit refactoring
intention. Our results show that (1) developers mostly use move refactoring
related terms/phrases to target refactoring-related issues; and (2) developers
tend to explicitly mention the improvement of specific quality attributes and
focus on duplicate code removal. We envision our findings enabling tool
builders to support developers with automated documentation of refactoring
changes in issues.
