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Software systems should be explainable, that is, they should help us to answer questions while exploring, developing or using them. Textual documentation is a very weak form of explanation, since it is not causally connected to the code, so…
Refactoring is a maintenance activity that aims to improve design quality while preserving the behavior of a system. Several (semi)automated approaches have been proposed to support developers in this maintenance activity, based on the…
Refactoring is the de-facto practice to optimize software health. While several studies propose refactoring strategies to optimize software design through applying design patterns and removing design defects, little is known about how…
Refactoring is the art of improving the design of a system without altering its external behavior. Refactoring has become a well established and disciplined software engineering practice that has attracted a significant amount of research…
Modern software development teams are distributed across onsite and off-shore locations. Each team has developers with varying experience levels and English communication skills. In such a diverse development environment it is important to…
A recurring problem in software development is incorrect decision making on the techniques, methods and tools to be used. Mostly, these decisions are based on developers' perceptions about them. A factor influencing people's perceptions is…
Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a widely adopted software engineering practice that requires developers to create and execute tests alongside code implementation, ensuring that software behavior is continuously validated and refined. In…
Refactoring is a common practice in software development, aimed at improving the internal code structure in order to make it easier to understand and modify. Consequently, it is often assumed that refactoring makes the code less prone to…
Many engineering processes exist in the industry, text books and international standards. However, in practice rarely any of the processes are followed consistently and literally. It is observed across industries the processes are altered…
Analysing and improving productivity has been one of the main goals of software engineering research since its beginnings. A plethora of studies has been conducted on various factors that resulted in several models for analysis and…
Understanding and effectively managing Technical Debt (TD) remains a vital challenge in software engineering. While many studies on code-level TD have been published, few illustrate the business impact of low-quality source code. In this…
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…
Automated program synthesis lowers the cost of producing implementations but introduces a harder governance problem: determining which generated artifacts are admissible. Natural-language specifications are ambiguous, and example-based…
Creating functions is at the center of writing computer programs. But there has been little empirical research on how this is done and what are the considerations that developers use. We design an experiment in which we can compare the…
Test Case Prioritization (TCP) is an increasingly important regression testing technique for reordering test cases according to a pre-defined goal, particularly as agile practices gain adoption. To better understand these techniques, we…
Automatic test generation aims to save developers time and effort by producing test suites with reasonably high coverage and fault detection. However, the focus of search-based generation tools in maximizing coverage leaves other…
Object Oriented Design methodology is an emerging software development approach for complex systems with huge set of requirements. Unlike procedural approach, it captures the requirements as a set of data rather than services, encapsulated…
There are repetitive patterns in strategies of manipulating source code. For example, modifying source code before acquiring knowledge of how a code works is a depth-first style and reading and understanding before modifying source code is…
In this paper, we present a tertiary systematic literature review of previous surveys, secondary systematic literature reviews, and systematic mappings. We identify the main observations (what we know) and challenges (what we do not know)…
Modern code review is a widely used technique employed in both industrial and open-source projects to improve software quality, share knowledge, and ensure adherence to coding standards and guidelines. During code review, developers may…