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Concurrency has been rapidly gaining importance in general-purpose computing, caused by the recent turn towards multicore processing architectures. As a result, an increasing number of developers have to learn to write concurrent programs,…

It is quite common for security testing to be delayed until after the software has been developed, but vulnerabilities may get noticed throughout the implementation phase and the earlier they are discovered, the easier and cheaper it will…

Humanitarian organizations face a critical choice: invest in costly commercial APIs or rely on free open-weight models for multilingual human rights monitoring. While commercial systems offer reliability, open-weight alternatives lack…

Over the past few decades, open source software has been continuously integrated into software supply chains worldwide, drastically increasing reliance and dependence. Because of the role this software plays, it is important to understand…

Online collaboration platforms such as GitHub have provided software developers with the ability to easily reuse and share code between repositories. With clone-and-own and forking becoming prevalent, maintaining these shared files is…

Every year, millions of functional systems become e-waste because users are pressured to send their systems to landfills due to a lack of vendor support and difficulty in recycling. Vendors cite ``cybersecurity'' as the driver for short…

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…

The same-origin policy is a fundamental part of the Web. Despite the restrictions imposed by the policy, embedding of third-party JavaScript code is allowed and commonly used. Nothing is guaranteed about the integrity of such code. To…

Writing logging messages is a well-established conventional programming practice, and it is of vital importance for a wide variety of software development activities. The logging mechanism in Solidity programming is enabled by the…

As AI code assistants become increasingly integrated into software development workflows, understanding how their code compares to human-written programs is critical for ensuring reliability, maintainability, and security. In this paper, we…

Contracts are a form of lightweight formal specification embedded in the program text. Being executable parts of the code, they encourage programmers to devote proper attention to specifications, and help maintain consistency between…

Code cloning plays a very important role in open-source software engineering. The presence of clones within a project may indicate a need for refactoring, and clones between projects are even more interesting, since code migration takes…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in various software engineering tasks, including error detection, clone detection, and code translation, primarily leveraging high-resource programming languages like…

Code smells are symptoms of potential code quality problems that may affect software maintainability, thus increasing development costs and impacting software reliability. Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities for…

Reading code is an essential activity in software maintenance and evolution. Several studies with human subjects have investigated how different factors, such as the employed programming constructs and naming conventions, can impact code…

The phenomenon of architecture erosion can negatively impact the maintenance and evolution of software systems, and manifest in a variety of symptoms during software development. While erosion is often considered rather late, its symptoms…

Software quality is critical in modern software engineering, especially in large and evolving codebases. This study analyzes the evolution of software quality metrics in five successive versions of the open-source Java testing framework…

Code analysis is fundamental in Software Engineering, supporting debugging, optimization, and security assessment. Human developers approach it through syntax parsing, static semantics inference, and dynamic reasoning. Traditional tools are…

Open source is experiencing a renaissance period, due to the appearance of modern platforms and workflows for developing and maintaining public code. As a result, developers are creating open source software at speeds never seen before.…

Software testing is one of the very important Quality Assurance (QA) components. A lot of researchers deal with the testing process in terms of tester motivation and how tests should or should not be written. However, it is not known from…