Related papers: Less is More: Minimizing Code Reorganization using…
Duplicated code or code clones are a kind of code smell that have both positive and negative impacts on the development and maintenance of software systems. Software clone research in the past mostly focused on the detection and analysis of…
Architectural code smells erode software maintainability and are costly to repair manually, yet unlike localized bugs, they require cross-module reasoning about design intent that challenges both developers and automated tools. While large…
Bad requirements quality can cause expensive consequences during the software development lifecycle, especially if iterations are long and feedback comes late. %-- the faster a problem is found, the cheaper it is to fix. This makes explicit…
The identification of code smells is largely recognized as a subjective task. Consequently, the automated detection tools available are insufficient to deal with the whole subjectivity involved in the task, requiring human validation.…
Unstructured line-based merge tools are widely used in practice. Structured AST-based merge tools show significantly improved merge accuracy, but are rarely used in practice because they are language specific and costly, consequently not…
The popularity of machine learning has wildly expanded in recent years. Machine learning techniques have been heatedly studied in academia and applied in the industry to create business value. However, there is a lack of guidelines for code…
Background: Code review is a cognitively demanding and time-consuming process. Previous qualitative studies hinted at how decomposing change sets into multiple yet internally coherent ones would improve the reviewing process. So far,…
The modern code review process is an integral part of the current software development practice. Considerable effort is given here to inspect code changes, find defects, suggest an improvement, and address the suggestions of the reviewers.…
Test smells are known as bad development practices that reflect poor design and implementation choices in software tests. Over the last decade, test smells were heavily studied to measure their prevalence and impacts on test…
Although Extract Method is a key refactoring for improving program comprehension, refactoring tools for such purpose are often underused. To address this shortcoming, we present JExtract, a recommendation system based on structural…
During code reviews, an essential step in software quality assurance, reviewers have the difficult task of understanding and evaluating code changes to validate their quality and prevent introducing faults to the codebase. This is a tedious…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into software systems for diverse purposes, due to their versatility, flexibility, and ability to simulate human reasoning to some extent. However, poor integration of LLM inference…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is being increasingly used to learn and adapt application behavior in many domains, including large-scale and safety critical systems, as for example, autonomous driving. With the advent of plug-n-play RL…
This paper introduces a novel code-to-code search technique that enhances the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) by including both static and dynamic features as well as utilizing both similar and dissimilar examples during…
Code smells are indicators of potential design flaws in source code and do not appear alone but in combination with other smells, creating complex interactions. While existing literature classifies these smell interactions into collocated,…
Fixing software bugs and adding new features are two of the major maintenance tasks. Software bugs and features are reported as change requests. Developers consult these requests and often choose a few keywords from them as an ad hoc query.…
Elixir is a new functional programming language whose popularity is rising in the industry. However, there are few works in the literature focused on studying the internal quality of systems implemented in this language. Particularly, to…
Bad smells have been defined to describe potential problems in code, possibly pointing out refactoring opportunities. Several empirical studies have highlighted that smells have a negative impact on comprehension and maintainability.…
Code smells signal violations of design principles that degrade the internal quality of evolving software systems. Although many tools detect such anomalies using static metrics, they often ignore the development context in which smells…
This paper reports an empirical study on refactoring activity in three Java software systems. We investigated some questions on refactoring activity, to confirm or disagree on conclusions that have been drawn from previous empirical…