Related papers: On the Detection of High-Impact Refactoring Opport…

Software testing is one of the very important Quality Assurance (QA) components. A lot of researchers deal with the testing process in terms of tester motivation and how tests should or should not be written. However, it is not known from…

An essential part of software maintenance and evolution, refactoring is performed by developers, regardless of technology or domain, to improve the internal quality of the system, and reduce its technical debt. However, choosing the…

Test-based automated program repair has been a prolific field of research in software engineering in the last decade. Many approaches have indeed been proposed, which leverage test suites as a weak, but affordable, approximation to program…

Complex software can be hard to read, adapt, and maintain. Refactoring it can create cleaner and self-explanatory code. Refactoring tools try to guide developers towards better code, with more quality. However, most of them take too long to…

Inspection of code changes is a time-consuming task that constitutes a big part of everyday work of software engineers. Existing IDEs provide little information about the semantics of code changes within the file editor view. Therefore…

Unlike most other software quality attributes, testability cannot be evaluated solely based on the characteristics of the source code. The effectiveness of the test suite and the budget assigned to the test highly impact the testability of…

Popular IDEs frequently contain bugs in their refactoring implementations. Ensuring that a transformation preserves a program's behavior is a complex task. Traditional detection methods rely on predefined preconditions for each refactoring…

Developing automated and smart software vulnerability detection models has been receiving great attention from both research and development communities. One of the biggest challenges in this area is the lack of code samples for all…

Software development agents such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor Agent, Devin, and OpenAI Codex are being increasingly integrated into developer workflows. While prior work has evaluated agent capabilities for code completion and…

Refactoring is a practice widely adopted during software maintenance and evolution. Due to its importance, there is extensive work on the effectiveness of refactoring in achieving code quality. However, developer's intentions are usually…

We introduce a novel approach for inferring natural preconditions from code. Our technique produces preconditions of high quality in terms of both correctness (modulo a test generator) and naturalness. Prior works generate preconditions…

Duplicated code has a negative impact on the quality of software systems and should be detected at least. In this paper, we discuss an approach that improves source code retrieval using the structural information about the programs. We…

Proving programs terminating is a fundamental computer science challenge. Recent research has produced powerful tools that can check a wide range of programs for termination. The analog for probabilistic programs, namely termination with…

Widely used complex code refactoring tools lack a solid reasoning about the correctness of the transformations they implement, whilst interest in proven correct refactoring is ever increasing as only formal verification can provide true…

Software systems are evolving by adding new functions and modifying existing functions over time. Through the evolution, the structure of software is becoming more complex and so the understandability and maintainability of software systems…

For large software systems, refactoring activities can be a challenging task, since for keeping component complexity under control the overall architecture as well as many details of each component have to be considered. Product metrics are…

The null-type is a major source of faults in Java programs, and its overuse has a severe impact on software maintenance. Unfortunately traditional mutation testing operators do not cover null-type faults by default, hence cannot be used as…

Program comprehension concerns the ability of an individual to make an understanding of an existing software system to extend or transform it. Software systems comprise of data that are noisy and missing, which makes program understanding…

This case study is an update-in-place refactoring transformation on UML class diagrams. Its aim is to remove clones of attributes from a class diagram, and to identify new classes which abstract groups of classes that share common data…

The technique of database refactoring is all about applying disciplined and controlled techniques to change an existing database schema. The problem is to successfully create a Database Refactoring Framework for databases. This paper…