Related papers: Smelling out Code Clones: Clone Detection Tool Eva…

Context: Code smells (CS) tend to compromise software quality and also demand more effort by developers to maintain and evolve the application throughout its life-cycle. They have long been catalogued with corresponding mitigating solutions…

Over time, software systems suffer gradual quality decay and therefore costs can rise if organizations fail to take proactive countermeasures. Quality control is the first step to avoiding this cost trap. Continuous quality assessments help…

Background: Code cloning - copying and reusing pieces of source code - is a common phenomenon in software development in practice. There have been several empirical studies on the effects of cloning, but there are contradictory results…

Code review plays an important role in software quality control. A typical review process would involve a careful check of a piece of code in an attempt to find defects and other quality issues/violations. One type of issues that may impact…

Source code search plays an important role in software development, e.g. for exploratory development or opportunistic reuse of existing code from a code base. Often, exploration of different implementations with the same functionality is…

To detect large-variance code clones (i.e. clones with relatively more differences) in large-scale code repositories is difficult because most current tools can only detect almost identical or very similar clones. It will make promotion and…

Code clone detection plays a critical role in software maintenance and vulnerability analysis. Substantial methods have been proposed to detect code clones. However, they struggle to extract high-level program semantics directly from a…

Clone-and-own approach is a natural way of source code reuse for software developers. To assess how known bugs and security vulnerabilities of a cloned component affect an application, developers and security analysts need to identify an…

Code cloning is a common practice in software development, but it poses significant security risks by propagating vulnerabilities across cloned segments. To address this challenge, we introduce srcVul, a scalable, precise detection approach…

Agent tools are becoming a core interface through which LLM agents access external data, services, and execution environments. As these tools are distributed through public marketplaces, raw tool counts may substantially overstate ecosystem…

Code review is a critical practice in modern software engineering, helping developers detect defects early, improve code quality, and facilitate knowledge sharing. With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), a growing body…

There is a general belief that software must be able to easily do things that humans find difficult. Since finding sources for plagiarism in a text is not an easy task, there is a wide-spread expectation that it must be simple for software…

Software testing is a critical element of software quality assurance and represents the ultimate review of specification, design and coding. Software testing is the process of testing the functionality and correctness of software by running…

Malwares are continuously growing in sophistication and numbers. Over the last decade, remarkable progress has been achieved in anti-malware mechanisms. However, several pressing issues (e.g., unknown malware samples detection) still need…

Large-scale source-code clone detection is a challenging task. In our previous work, we proposed an approach (SSCD) that leverages artificial neural networks and approximates nearest neighbour search to effectively and efficiently locate…

Unfair behaviors of Machine Learning (ML) software have garnered increasing attention and concern among software engineers. To tackle this issue, extensive research has been dedicated to conducting fairness testing of ML software, and this…

Software testing ensures that a system functions correctly, meets specified requirements, and maintains high quality. As artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) technologies become integral to software systems, testing has evolved…

Clone group mapping has a very important significance in the evolution of code clone. The topic modeling techniques were applied into code clone firstly and a new clone group mapping method was proposed. The method is very effective for not…

Modern software systems are developed in diverse programming languages and often harbor critical vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit to compromise security. These vulnerabilities have been actively targeted in real-world attacks,…

Code refactoring is widely recognized as an essential software engineering practice to improve the understandability and maintainability of the source code. The Extract Method refactoring is considered as "Swiss army knife" of refactorings,…