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Refactoring is a critical task in software maintenance, and is usually performed to enforce better design and coding practices, while coping with design defects. The Extract Method refactoring is widely used for merging duplicate code…

Context. Code refactoring improves software quality without changing external behavior. Despite its advantages, its benefits are hindered by the considerable cost of time, resources, and continuous effort it demands. Aim. Understanding why…

To refactor already working code while keeping reliability, compatibility and perhaps security, we can borrow ideas from micropass/nanopass compilers. By treating the procedure of software refactoring as composing code transformations, and…

With the rapid development of deep learning, the implementation of intricate algorithms and substantial data processing have become standard elements of deep learning projects. As a result, the code has become progressively complex as the…

App quality has been shown to be the most important indicator of app adoption. To assure quality, developers mainly use testing to find bugs in app and apply structural and GUI test coverage criteria. However, mobile apps have more…

The fragmentation problem has extended from Android to different platforms, such as iOS, mobile web, and even mini-programs within some applications (app). In such a situation, recording and replaying test scripts is a popular automated…

During software development, poor design and implementation choices can detrimentally impact software maintainability. Design smells, recurring patterns of poorly designed fragments, signify these issues. Role-stereotypes denote the generic…

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…

Eradication of code smells is often pointed out as a way to improve readability, extensibility and design in existing software. However, code smell detection in large systems remains time consuming and error-prone, partly due to the…

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…

AI coding agents are increasingly contributing to software development, yet their impact on mobile development has received little empirical attention. In this paper, we present the first category-level empirical study of agent-generated…

Android apps are event-driven, and their execution is often interrupted by external events. This interruption can cause data loss issues that annoy users. For instance, when the screen is rotated, the current app page will be destroyed and…

CONTEXT: There has been a rapid growth in the use of data analytics to underpin evidence-based software engineering. However the combination of complex techniques, diverse reporting standards and poorly understood underlying phenomena are…

The reliability of mobile devices is a challenge for vendors, since the mobile software stack has significantly grown in complexity. In this paper, we study how to assess the impact of faults on the quality of user experience in the Android…

The rapid adoption of AI coding agents for software development has raised important questions about the quality and maintainability of the code they produce. While prior studies have examined AI-generated source code, the impact of AI…

Context: Software refactoring aims to improve software quality and developer productivity. Numerous empirical studies investigating the impact of refactoring activities on software quality have been conducted over the last two decades.…

Mobile devices have become ubiquitous tools for communication, entertainment, and productivity, yet battery autonomy remains a constraint. While energy-saving tips exist, they are often generic, anecdotal, or focused on software development…

Context: Refactoring is recognized as an effective practice to maintain evolving software systems. For software libraries, we study how library developers refactor their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), especially when it impacts…

The ability to identify the author responsible for a given software object is critical for many research studies and for enhancing software transparency and accountability. However, as opposed to other application markets like iOS,…

Code smells as symptoms of poor design and implementation choices. Many times they are the result of so called technical debt. Our study showed that the interest in code smells research is increasing. However, most of the publications are…