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Academic software development practices often differ from those of commercial development settings, yet only limited research has been conducted on assessing software development practises in academia. Here we present a case study of…

Background: Noise, defined as an unwanted sound, is one of the commonest factors that could affect people's performance in their daily work activities. The software engineering research community has marginally investigated the effects of…

Software systems often leverage on open source software libraries to reuse functionalities. Such libraries are readily available through software package managers like npm for JavaScript. Due to the huge amount of packages available in such…

Code Smell, similar to a bad smell, is a surface indication of something tainted but in terms of software writing practices. This metric is an indication of a deeper problem lies within the code and is associated with an issue which is…

Profiling techniques are used extensively at different parts of the computing stack to achieve many goals. One major goal is to make a piece of software execute more efficiently on a specific hardware platform, where efficiency spans…

Code readability and software complexity are important software quality metrics that impact other software metrics such as maintainability, reusability, portability and reliability. This paper presents an empirical study of the…

Software development includes diverse tasks such as implementing new features, analyzing requirements, and fixing bugs. Being an expert in those tasks requires a certain set of skills, knowledge, and experience. Several studies investigated…

Software defect prediction using code metrics has been extensively researched over the past five decades. However, prediction harnessing non-software metrics is under-researched. Considering that the root cause of software defects is often…

Programs are a kind of communication to both computers and people, hence as students are trained to write programs they need to learn to write well-designed, readable code rather than code that simply functions correctly. The difficulty in…

Many people aim for change, but not everyone succeeds. While there are a number of social psychology theories that propose motivation-related characteristics of those who persist with change, few computational studies have explored the…

Creativity is a critical skill that professional software engineers leverage to tackle difficult problems. In higher education, multiple efforts have been made to spark creative skills of engineering students. However, creativity is a vague…

Recent waves of technological transformation are reshaping work in uncertain and hard-to-predict ways. However, jobs at the forefront of the digitizing economy offer an early glimpse of these changes and leave rich activity traces. We…

Context: Application Programming Interface (API) code examples are an essential knowledge resource for learning APIs. However, a few user studies have explored how the structural characteristics of the source code in code examples impact…

The widespread availability of large language models (LLMs) has changed how students engage with coding and problem-solving. While these tools may increase student productivity, they also make it more difficult for instructors to assess…

Many software development platforms now support LLM-driven programming, or "vibe coding", a technique that allows one to specify programs in natural language and iterate from observed behavior, all without directly editing source code.…

Programming problems can be solved in a multitude of functionally correct ways, but the quality of these solutions (e.g. readability, maintainability) can vary immensely. When code quality is poor, symptoms emerge in the form of 'code…

Anecdotal evidence of cannabis use by professional programmers abounds. Recent studies have found that some professionals regularly use cannabis while programming even for work-related tasks. However, accounts of the impacts of cannabis on…

An agile approach has become very popular over the last decade, which requires good communication and teamwork within teams as well as with outside stakeholders. Therefore, social interaction is central for a software development team to be…

Background. Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance and is generally performed to enforce the best design and implementation practices or to cope with design defects. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used by software engineers for code generation. However, limitations of LLMs such as irrelevant or incorrect code have highlighted the need for prompt programming (or prompt engineering) where…