Related papers: User Interface Design Smell: Automatic Detection a…
A code smell is a surface indicator of an inherent problem in the system, most often due to deviation from standard coding practices on the developers part during the development phase. Studies observe that code smells made the code more…
Researchers have developed numerous debugging approaches to help programmers in the debugging process, but these approaches are rarely used in practice. In this paper, we investigate how programmers debug their code and what researchers…
Retrospective meetings play a vital role in agile development by facilitating team reflection on past work to enhance effectiveness. These meetings address various social aspects, including team dynamics, individual performance, processes,…
Context. Code smells, which are recurring anomalies in design or style, have been extensively researched in professional code. However, their significance in block-based projects created by novices is still largely unknown. Block-based…
Large language model (LLM)-based computer use agents execute user commands by interacting with available UI elements, but little is known about how users want to interact with these agents or what design factors matter for their user…
Recent advances in coding agents have shown remarkable progress in software issue resolution. In practice, real-world issues are typically bug fixes or feature requests in which human developers naturally incorporate refactoring as part of…
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…
Machine Learning (ML) projects incur novel challenges in their development and productionisation over traditional software applications, though established principles and best practices in ensuring the project's software quality still…
Spreadsheet users are often unaware of the risks imposed by poorly designed spreadsheets. One way to assess spreadsheet quality is to detect smells which attempt to identify parts of spreadsheets that are hard to comprehend or maintain and…
This study presents a quantitative evaluation of the code quality and security of five prominent Large Language Models (LLMs): Claude Sonnet 4, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4o, Llama 3.2 90B, and OpenCoder 8B. While prior research has assessed…
UI design languages, such as Google's Material Design, make applications both easier to develop and easier to learn by providing a set of standard UI components. Nonetheless, it is hard to assess the impact of design languages in the wild.…
Test smells can pose difficulties during testing activities, such as poor maintainability, non-deterministic behavior, and incomplete verification. Existing research has extensively addressed test smells in automated software tests but…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming software engineering, with coding assistants embedded in an IDE becoming increasingly prevalent. While research has focused on improving the tools and understanding developer…
The aims of this paper are: 1) to identify "worst smells", i.e., bad smells that never have a good reason to exist, 2) to determine the frequency, change-proneness, and severity associated with worst smells, and 3) to identify the "worst…
In the current IT world, developers write code while system operators run the code mostly as a black box. The connection between both worlds is typically established with log messages: the developer provides hints to the (unknown) operator,…
Existing Graphical User Interface (GUI) reasoning tasks remain challenging, particularly in UI understanding. Current methods typically rely on direct screen-based decision-making, which lacks interpretability and overlooks a comprehensive…
AI agents that build user interfaces on the fly assembling buttons, forms, and data displays from structured protocol payloads are becoming common in production systems. The trouble is that a payload can pass every schema check and still…
Microservices have become a mainstream architectural paradigm, yet microservice bad smells can significantly harm maintainability and performance. Existing detection tools often produce obscure outputs and lack effective integration with…
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enables automated provisioning of large-scale cloud and on-premise environments, reducing the need for repetitive manual setup. However, this automation is a double-edged sword: a single misconfiguration in IaC…
To ensure the quality of a software system, developers perform an activity known as unit testing, where they write code (known as test cases) that verifies the individual software units that make up the system. Like production code, test…